A wholly owned subsidiary of Aboitiz Power, the Luzon Hydro Corporation (LHC), is at loggerheads with the municipal government of Alilem, Ilocos Sur that levied the former’s hydropower facilities for alleged nonpayment of taxes amounting to more than P400 million. While the company was able to get a temporary restraining order to stop the sale of the assets, there is a lot more to this news than meets the eye.
Alilem might be thinking that they are not getting their fair share from the profits being realized by LHC from its operation of the hydropower plant in that municipality. Or some incumbent politicians or other powers-that-be want to satisfy their greed by taking over the plant.
Another possibility is the people running LHC have become arrogant, swaggering around as if they owned the place and the people there. In short, they don’t feel they owe anything to the locals so they don’t care to maintain good relations with the community.
While LHC resorted to the courts and they appear to have won the first round, it has to remember that they will have to continue operating in the place and have to seek a longer lasting solution. A victory in court would be nothing if the people there don’t like the company to continue its operation.
Politicians can salivate over the company’s assets but if they don’t have the support of the people, these politicians will not force their way or satisfy their greed through illegal confiscatory measures. It boils down to a battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Some trickeries, even threats, will be used but in the end, who gets the people’s support will emerge the victorious.
Aboitiz Power of course has a lot of subsidiaries and how each one behaves towards the community would be different depending on the mentality of those running it. But there should be a common strategy amongst the subsidiaries. How this is carried out would of course be different from place to place and the culture or mentality of host communities.
If a subsidiary’s attitude is that the host communities “can go to hell,” then there will be an equal (or greater) opposite reaction. If the people running it think that they can afford to be aloof, that they think they can exist in a vacuum, then they will get the shock of their lives at some point in the future. For there will always be a reckoning.
And the worst part of this is the backlash will affect other Aboitiz subsidiaries. There is an Aboitiz Power subsidiary hereabouts whose PR was very good, but there is another whose community relations seems to be characterized by arrogance or, at the very least, incompetence.**