She comes from Lubao, Pampanga,
and that is the single credential necessary.
A month back, we wrote:
"When the replacement of (Energy Regulatory chair) Rodolfo Albano is named next
month, we have one question to ask. How is the WACC calculated? If he could not
provide an answer, thats it. Its bayad utang time, and to hell with power
users."
The background for that piece is the need for people at the
ERC who must have an understanding of the complicated business of determining
power rates based on cost of power generation, transmission and distribution
plus some reasonable profit.
During the Senate hearings on the high power rates paid by
the customers of Meralco, Albano said a) that it was news to him that Meralco
was charging its own power consumption to consumer in the form of "systems loss"
and b) that he was in the dark about the alleged sweetheart deals between
Meralco and Lopez-owned generating companies.
WACC (weighted average cost of capital) was mentioned because
it has replaced RORB (return on rate base) as the formula for calculating the
reasonable rate of profit of a utility like Meralco. Our point is that somebody
who has no idea of how the WACC using higher calculus - is arrived at has no
business sitting at the ERC.
Yesterday, we heard Senators Nene Pimentel and Chiz Escudero
on radio saying Gloria Arroyo was seriously considering former Rep. Zenaida
Ducut as Albanos replacement. The two senators scoffed at the qualifications of
Ducut, saying she was a bar flunker.
Pimentel and Escudero are both accomplished lawyers (the
former served as Law dean of Xavier University; the latter got his masters from
Georgetown University), so it is understandable for them to look down their
noses at one who did not pass the bar the first time around. Ducut, however,
must have eventually made it, although we have no idea after how many tries,
because the chair of the ERC is required by the law to be a member of the bar.
On further checking, we found in an old web entry on Ducut
that she took up Political Science and then Law at Far Eastern University. In
her career history, we also found that she had been a professor at the
University of the Assumption, East Central Colleges and Harvardian Colleges.
We also saw that on her third and last term as a member of
the House, she was vice chairman of the committee on agriculture and member of
the committees on bases conversion, games and amusement and inter-parliamentary
relations.
There is no record showing she was a member of the committee
on energy, the chairmanship of which was bagged without effort by her successor,
Rep. Mikey Arroyo, in his first term.
Ducuts qualifications for ERC chairman are truly
underwhelming.
But she comes from Lubao, Pampanga, and that, we suppose, is the single
credential necessary to serve in an important position in this administration.
