Red plates, velvet gloves
The LTO should also suspend and, if necessary, revoke Torre’s driver’s license. The MMDA? Well, it should fire him pronto instead of trying to make light of the matter.
Text size
The LTO should also suspend and, if necessary, revoke Torre’s driver’s license. The MMDA? Well, it should fire him pronto instead of trying to make light of the matter.
It’s perfectly understandable if the once-discarded and now recycled Nicolas Torre III, general manager of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), would like to bury his head in the sand like an ostrich.
You see, there’s comic elegance to Torre’s P3.5-million, armored white Toyota Fortuner being caught on video running the restricted EDSA Busway while wearing another government vehicle’s plates that belonged to a frigging MMDA dump truck at that.
Torre’s explanation is that he was checking roadworks near EDSA-Guadalupe and responding to a stalled vehicle. That may explain why the SUV was on the Busway, but it does not explain away the plate tampering.
Republic Act 4136 is very clear when it comes to license plates. They are assigned to specific vehicles, and transferring them from one vehicle to another is prohibited. Section 31 likewise prohibits the use of plates in imitation or similitude of official plates, with violations subject to penalties under the law.
The bigger problem isn’t just that there are many law-benders in this government. It’s delicadeza — the old Caesar’s wife standard that a public official must be above suspicion, not merely acquitted of it.
MMDA Chairman Romando Artes says Torre stays in office because no suspension order exists and that the probe isn’t finished. That is a perfectly adequate answer to a question nobody asked. Nobody wants to know if Torre has been convicted.
The ethical dilemma is whether an agency tasked with ticketing this exact violation can keep its own general manager in his seat while investigating whether he committed it.
Torre himself recently sacked an MMDA traffic enforcer for counterflowing on the Busway with his motorcycle. Are MMDA officials frat boys out to protect one another? Talk about enforcing the rules selectively. What double standard.
While the Land Transportation Office (LTO) suspended the license of Torre’s driver and held his SUV in custody, we have a problem here that it should address, since it has been very cavalier and whimsical in revoking the licenses of ordinary motorists and riders.
If Torre says he was in the vehicle, then the circumstances naturally raise the question of whether he ordered his driver to take the Busway. If he did not, then surely, as the government’s de facto traffic czar, he should have ordered his driver to leave the restricted lane immediately rather than allow the violation to continue.
The LTO should also suspend and, if necessary, revoke Torre’s driver’s license. The MMDA? Well, it should fire him pronto instead of trying to make light of the matter. Artes should be reminded: It’s all about delicadeza.
If Torre stays, the MMDA shall have confirmed something else: The rules are strict — until one of its own needs a little wiggle room. This for someone who slapped MMDA decals and “repurposed” MMDA garbage truck license plates on his SUV to misrepresent it as an official government vehicle.
