Press Release
December 11, 2010

Jinggoy supports DOTC's move to revisit deal with Stradcom

SENATE President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Ejercito Estrada backs Department of Transportation and Communication's (DOTC) plan to look for a new IT provider after the operations of the Land Transportation Office (LTO) were severely affected by internal squabble among Stradcom's incorporators.

 It can be recalled that tension gripped the LTO compound in Quezon City on December 9, 2010 as a group of armed men took over the building that houses the facilities of the agency's lone information technology (IT) provider, paralyzing for at least 7 hours LTO's integrated IT system that interconnects all its 250 offices nationwide, and manages their daily online transactions.

The tension was an offshoot of a corporate squabble between two factions in the management of the LTO's IT provider, Stradcom Corp.

 As a result, DOTC Secretary Jose de Jesus said the government is looking at filing a case against Stradcom for possible breach of contract.

 The government's contract with Stradcom will end om 2013. De Jesus said any violation would be ground for the contract's early termination

 In the meantime, LTO led by its Assistant Secretary Virginia Torres took over the management of Stradcom until such time that the legal issue between the two groups claiming ownership is settled.

 "DOTC should revisit their contract with Stradcom after the latter irresponsibly paralyzed LTO's work for hours and putting innocent lives in danger," Sen. Estrada suggests.

 "While the LTO immediately stepped in to resume their daily operations, we are not sure that this will not happen again tomorrow. The stakeholders have become so brazen that they have staged a corporate coup and sabotage their operations. I think they have to resolve this first on their own before the public can be assured that no similar incident can happen again," Sen. Estrada said.

 Sen. Estrada maintained that the bottomline here is the efficient service that the general public and taxpayers should be getting from the LTO's IT service provider.

 Should the DOTC and LTO management decide in the end to terminate their IT provision contract with Stradcom, they should consider other contractual agreement schemes like build-operate-transfer or private-public partnership, as opposed to the current setup with Stradcom which is build-own-operate.

 Records at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Stradcom only had a starting paid-up capital of P500 million when it started it's operation on March 26, 1998.

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