Probe Customs fire

At about 9 p.m. on Feb. 22, flames were seen billowing out of the third floor of the 82-year-old Bureau of Customs (BOC) building at the Port of Manila.

The fire quickly escalated to the fifth and highest alarm level an hour later. Some 30 fire trucks responded to the urgent call for help to put out the blaze, which had by then engulfed the third and fourth floors of one of the few buildings in the city of Manila that had survived the horrors of World War II.

The brave firefighters were able to put the fire under control past 4 a.m. on Saturday, before completely subduing it three hours later.

By the end of the 10-hour disaster, the two floors of the neoclassical, colonnaded masterpiece designed by architect Antonio Toledo of the Bureau of Public Works in 1937 were gutted.

An estimated P50 million in equipment and property were destroyed, according to BOC spokesperson Erastus Austria.

The BOC, one of the two main revenue-generating agencies of the government, immediately organized a special response team to attend to all queries, concerns and suggestions of the transacting public concerning the Port of Manila operations, and has temporarily set up office in the gymnasium.

Customs Commissioner Rey Leonardo B. Guerrero also put out a statement saying he was “saddened” by the fire, and assuring the public that personnel had been deployed to immediately restore and reestablish systems and facilities so the office can resume normal operations posthaste.

The government’s task, however, shouldn’t stop with restoring normalcy in Customs operations. There is the burning question of how the fire started in the first place, and what was irretrievably lost to it.

Misamis Oriental Rep. Juliette Uy is on the right track not only in calling for an official probe into the incident, but also in the reasons she cites for such a move: “Given the notoriety of the Bureau of Customs for graft and corruption, it is understandable for the public to be skeptical about the cause of the fire that razed [its] offices….”

To dispel such suspicions, Uy has called on Local Government Secretary Eduardo Año to summon the best arson investigators from the Bureau of Fire Protection and look into this incident.

The investigation, she said, must be “meticulous, thorough and scientific.”

Any inquiry by government investigators should also be accompanied by a parallel probe in the Senate, to ensure that all the findings are subjected to scrutiny and transmitted to the public in as transparent a manner as possible.

Sen. Richard Gordon, chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee, had said in a report that the Philippines loses billions of pesos in revenues a year due to entrenched corruption at the BOC.

In 2017 alone, an estimated P98.5 billion was lost due to the notorious “tara” system, money that could have funded the military, social security, housing for the poor and the education system.

How many of the BOC’s records that could shed light on the transactions and systems operating within it are now gone for good because of the fire?

A proper accounting should be able to provide government officials and the public a good idea of the extent of the records loss.

A more urgent line of inquiry is whether the papers related to the biggest Customs-related controversy so far — the P6.8 billion worth of “shabu” that mysteriously slipped through its doors inside magnetic lifters that were later found abandoned in Cavite — were gutted as well.

Such a loss would unavoidably raise suspicion and speculation, given the graft charges lodged by the National Bureau of Investigation against former Customs commissioner Isidro Lapeña and a number of others over the smuggling incident.

Austria gave the assurance that the pertinent papers are intact. “There are a lot of documents in different offices that are located in the Port of Manila na affected, but I’m sure the biggest question on people’s minds is if apektado ba yung documents for the ongoing investigation. That is not the case.”

Documents and records destroyed by the fire would be restored soon, added Guerrero, with the BOC’s Management Information System and Technology Group working double time on the job. “We want to assure the public that our operations will not be affected by the incident,” he said.

Well and good. But, other than such guarantees, an official, honest-to-goodness investigation to get to the bottom of this mysterious blaze is still warranted.