🇵🇭 Maria on the up, Leila still in and Sara stays defiant

Hello friends!

A look at the major stories in the Philippines and Indonesia here from me. With the Indonesian election kicking off for real recently, we’ll be a bit light on Indonesia in the coming months. To get all that electoral coverage, join us here at Ayolah.

And as I said Tuesday: I’ve had an enormous influx of new free subscribers, which is always exciting. The country-specific newsletters are usually within the paywall but to celebrate someone (who!) very nicely putting my name out there I’m going to keep this week open and hope that some new readers join us:

I offer free subscriptions for all Asean and Timorese nationals under 30, so if that’s you just let me know via reply and I can activate that. Substack also has a very easy institutional membership tier that a couple of workplaces have taken advantage of. This makes it much easier for finance departments to reimburse and for me to not cry when I see how many people with fancy email addresses forward it regularly. 

See you tomorrow for a Vietnam wrap.

Erin Cook

🇵🇭 How do you solve a ‘problem’ like Maria? Not through the tax code, I guess!

Nobel Prize recipient Maria Ressa is beaming this week. A Pasig City court threw out the final charge against her and Rappler — this one on tax evasion — bringing to an end (at least for now) years of legal uncertainty. CNN notes it comes eight months after four other counts of tax code violations, all filed in 2018 by the former Duterte government of course, lost in court.

“We share this with our colleagues in the industry who have been besieged by relentless online attacks, unjust arrests and detentions, and red-tagging that have resulted in physical harm. We share this with Filipinos doing business for social good but who, like us, have suffered at the hands of oppressive governments,” Rappler said in a statement. 

It always bears repeating that the Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for media workers. 

Things haven’t been quite so fortuitous for former senator Leila de Lima. De Lima saw her own bogus drug charges thrown out and herself acquitted but now the Office of the Solicitor General isn’t so sure. They picked the wrong woman for that: she’s a former justice secretary, after all. 

“An acquittal is an acquittal, a final and conclusive disposition of the merits of the case which, under firmly settled case law, is no longer appealable, save for very exceptional grounds or circumstances, none of which can be legitimately invoked to question the 12 May 2023 Decision of the RTC-Muntinlupa, [Branch] 205 exonerating me and my co-accused,” she said, as per Rappler. 

Vice President Sara Duterte is trying her hand at a little financial impunity, but it has been bumpy-ish for her. The Office of the VP had its 2024 budget approved this month, including a strange 500 million peso ‘confidential fund’. (That’s nearly $9 million USD!) What do you need all that secretive money for, Senators reasonably asked. Oh, it’s for ‘intelligence gathering’ and the VP/Education Secretary can’t talk about it openly, so don’t worry about it.

Criticism hasn’t let up this week, but Duterte is unphased. She said the ‘Alliance of Concerned Teachers Rep. France Castro and Sen. Risa Hontiveros were being dramatic,” the Inquirer reported. The whinging will “eventually lose its charm,” she added. 

In other news that doesn’t really pass the queasy feeling in your stomach test, President (and, crucially, Agriculture Secretary) Bongbong Marcos announced a cap on rice prices amid surging costs at the end of August. ‘The price ceiling, which will remain in effect indefinitely, mandates a maximum price of 41 pesos ($0.72) per kilo for regular milled rice and 45 pesos ($0.79) for well-milled rice,’ Nikkei Asia reported at the top of the month.

Rice is a tricky one for the Philippines. According to the USDA's ‘Grain: World Markets and Trade,’ the country is the world’s top importer overtaking China last year. 

🇮🇩 Sellers, you’re blocked

This Indonesia section feels so little and I was ashamed, but then I remembered I wrote a thousand words about on Monday AND Friday, so we’re good. Follow along with the presidential election with me here! 

Get your garbage for sale off the internet, Jerry Sambuaga, deputy minister of trade, told parliament this week. “Social media and social commerce cannot be combined. Revisions to the trade regulations that are currently underway will firmly and explicitly ban this,” he said, as reported by Reuters. This is specifically targeting selling products while live on Tik Tok or Instagram and I, increasingly understanding why the Luddites did what they did, think that’s a great idea. It’s predatory and WEIRD. How this would work in practice, given I can buy snacks on Instagram and imported melatonin supplements on TikTok, I can’t say, but certainly one to watch. 

There’s been ‘poor communication’ in Riau, President Joko Widodo said this week as protests against a planned development saw locals and law enforcement clash over several days. Locals reject a planned eco-city development on Rempang Island in the province, but the president promised to dispatch Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia to come out and chat over the proposal. 

The Jakarta Post notes that a MoU signed back in July with Chinese glass manufacturer Xinyi Group would see the world’s second-largest glass factory built on the island. This, the paper reports, could explain much of the outrage given how tense Chinese-built industry in Indonesia has been in the past, particularly in nickel processing plans further east.