The foreign business community has urged the government to maintain consistency, predictability, fairness, and due process stressing the move of the Bureau of Customs to seize the importation of one of its members is bad for business.

The Joint Foreign Chamber, which is composed of foreign business chambers including American, Australian-New Zealand, European, Canadian, Korean, Japanese and multinationals operating headquarters in the Philippines, stressed this in a letter to Finance Secretary Margarito Teves in light of plans by the government over the importation of catalytic cracked gasoline (CCG) of Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. over tax issues.

“While we understand that government may have to change rules and regulations, we have always reiterated that the following principles are important for business: Consistency, predictability, fairness, due process and no retroactive changes,” the letter stated.

The JFC, which boasts of having represented a substantial share of investors operating in the Philippines and are almost always the first point of contact of new investors, stressed they are issuing this in the name of achieving a level playing field for investors and to continue to bring new investors to the country.

“We are continually watching the dispute between government agencies and Pilipinas Shell with deep concern,” the letter added.

First, the JFC noted of the double taxation impact on Shll stressing that taxing both intermediates and the final product, undermines the JFC’s efforts to encourage manufacturing investments in the Philippines “Double taxation favors trading over manufacturing which cannot be in the interest of Philippine economic policy makers. We suggest that this policy be urgently addressed as it is detrimental to the vision of growth in manufacturing,”the letter pointed out.

Second, given the Shell / BIR / BOC debate, the JFC said that some of these principles are severely compromised and will discourage future investments. Again we request government to review this case in this light.

Third, the JFC members are concerned about the heavy hand of government in this case, threatening to confiscate future shipments, endangering the supply of vital products to the economy, on the basis of retroactive changes in government regulations.