Supreme Court gives green light to LTO IT project 

MANILA, Philippines – The Supreme Court has junked the writ of preliminary injunction issued by the Regional Trial Court of Quezon City on the P8.2-billion Land Transportation Office information technology (LTO IT) project.

In a decision penned by Associate Justice Jhosep Lopez, made public on September 5, the SC’s Second Division affirmed the September 28, 2012, ruling of the Court of Appeals (CA) that reversed the preliminary injunctions issued by Judge Afable Cajigal of QC RTC Branch 96 in favor of prospective bidders Amalgamated Motors Philippines Incorporated (AMPI) and Realtime Data Management Services Incorporated (RDMSI).  

In its 2012 ruling, the CA said that AMPI and RDMSI had “no clear legal rights” to seek an injunction.

In its 17-page decision, the SC’s Second Division said: “Without necessarily preempting the RTC’s ruling in the main case, this Court finds that petitioner’s right, for purposes of the preliminary injunction, is not clear and unmistakable. It is not a right in esse (actually existing). At best, petitioner’s right was merely speculative.”

The Court added, “In the present case, petitioner, being a mere prospective bidder, did not have any clear and unmistakable right.”

The SC also did not give merit to the claim of AMPI that it would lose billions of pesos if the bidding process were allowed to proceed, only to be nullified later on.

“Aside from failing to explain how it will suffer such a huge amount of monetary loss, this Court has ruled that easily quantifiable damages cannot be considered grave and irreparable,” the Court said.  

The LTO IT project is envisioned to address the data access problem in vehicle registration. The Department of Transportation and Communications had said in 2012 that the IT system “will provide a viable and long-term solution to address the previous system’s issues, such as the problem of key data like vehicle registration being handled by a third-party provider and not by the government.” – Rappler.com