By Catherine Cueto

PLDT Inc., on Tuesday welcomed DITO Telecommunity Corporation’s (DITO) declaration to amicably settle its alleged unpaid contractual obligation due to them amounting to P430 Million.

According to the statement from PLDT, this is for the services they continue to deliver so that DITO can provide telco services to its subscribers. 

“This, because PLDT welcomes the amicable settlement of accounts by its debtors even if those debtors are PLDT’s competitors,” PLDT said in their statement.

However, PLDT said that DITO should show its truthfulness.

“But DITO must demonstrate its good faith by ceasing its attempts to confuse the issue and to mislead the public by claiming that PLDT’s efforts to collect on DITO’s debt is somehow an anticompetitive activity or interconnection issue that merits some unspecified “legal process” rather than just DITO’s simple payment of its defaulted P430 million debt,” Smart Said.

An earlier statement by DITO CME Holdings Corp. last week said that their telecommunications subsidiary DITO Telecommunity Corp. is currently in talks with PLDT, Inc. about the latter’s P430-million demand.

On Oct. 7, the Pangilinan-led PLDT said it had served DITO with a notice of material breach and demand for payment “as a result of its refusal to pay the amount of P429.73 million for contracted services which PLDT has fully performed and delivered, relating to the building and provisioning of transmission facilities that DITO required and is using for the delivery of telecommunication services.”

DITO had said that they were “compelled to enter into an agreement” with PLDT for the provisioning of the transmission facilities to allow DITO to interconnect with the subscribers of PLDT’s Smart Communications, Inc. “for the purpose of supporting the parties’ obligations under their interconnection agreement.”

They claimed that Smart’s refusal to augment DITO’s capacity to interconnect with the latter’s subscribers “has to no small degree compromised DITO-Smart voice traffic, adding to the underutilization of the initial bandwidth capacity provided by Smart to DITO.”

But PLDT countered, saying its demand has nothing to do with the interconnection capacity issue.