Hyatt 10 sets agenda for next administration

THE members of the so-called Hyatt 10, who defected from the Cabinet of President Gloria Arroyo in 2005, on Wednesday outlined the agenda for the new administration under Senator Benigno Aquino III.

“Our country badly needs this shot in the arm,” said Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, the first to accept a Cabinet post from Aquino.

“We have been given a second chance to do this right.”

Soliman is set to become Social Welfare secretary under the Aquino administration, the same post she gave up when she resigned in 2005 and joined other defecting Cabinet members at the Hyatt Hotel and Casino Manila to urge Mrs. Arroyo to step down amid a vote-rigging scandal.

Soliman and her colleagues had urged Arroyo to resign and later backed Aquino in the election.

A committee is to help Aquino form a Cabinet before he takes his oath June 30, selecting people “with integrity, honesty and no track record of corrupt practices,” Soliman said.

She added that bloated government contracts, especially those signed in the final six months under Mrs. Arroyo, “will be reviewed before honored.”

On Tuesday, Aquino renewed his campaign vow to go after President Arroyo and her cronies for any corrupt acts in office.

“We need to have closure on all items like the fertilizer scam. We lost P720 million. Who is responsible for this? Let’s also look at ZTE,” Aquino told the Reuters wire agency on Wednesday.

Teresita Deles, who was the presidential peace adviser before she split from Mrs. Arroyo in 2005, said Aquino would immediately reconstitute a peace panel negotiating with the New People’s Army rebels and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Negotiations with the two groups have stalled under President Arroyo.

The credit rating agency Moody’s Investor Service said the success of the first automated polls in Asia was of greater relevance than the result itself.

“Aquino ran on a platform of transformational leadership that was heavy on rhetoric, but light on substance,” Moody’s said.

“The incoming administration will thus need to remove ambiguity on its economic and fiscal policies in the months ahead to shore up further the government’s credit fundamentals.”

Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales gave President Arroyo a failing grade on Wednesday, saying she did nothing to restore her declining credibility in the last few months as president.

“She did not face the challenges that well. She missed a great chance to be a good leader,” Rosales said in his homily at the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting command center at the Pope Pius XII Center on United Nations Avenue, Manila.

He noted that her administration was marred by many controversies such as the ZTE broadband deal and the fertilizer scam.

But the archbishop praised the conduct of the last automated election, a project that Mrs. Arroyo fully supported. AP, Roderick T. dela Cruz, Vito Barcelo, Manila Standard Today