PRESIDENT Marcos Jr. has appointed lawyer Ferdinand Negre as the new commissioner of the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) and engineer Gerald Divinagracia as deputy director general of the Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA), the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) announced yesterday.
On its social media account, the PCO said Negre and Divinagra led the latest batch of appointees, which also include those named to the Department of Agriculture (DA), National Tripartite Industrial Peace Council (TIPC), Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), and the Office of the President (OP).
Negre, also a certified public accountant, earned his juris doctor degree from the Ateneo Law School in 1991 and obtained a post-graduate degree of Master of Intellectual Property at Pierce University in New Hampshire in 1993.
He is a recipient of a Post-Graduate Scholarship Program on Intellectual Property at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center in Munich, Germany and at the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute in London.
Negre teaches intellectual property law at the Ateneo Law School where he chairs the Commercial Law and Intellectual Property Department and was a former member of the Supreme Court Sub-Committee on Special Rules in Intellectual Property Cases, aside from being a former auditor at SGV & Co.
The PCC, according to the Republic Act (RA) 10677 or the Philippine Competition Act (PCA), is composed of a chairperson who holds the rank of a Cabinet secretary and four commissioners who hold the ranks of undersecretary. They serve a term of seven years without reappointment.
The PCC is an independent quasi-judicial body mandated to implement the national competition policy and enforce the primary law in the Philippines for promoting and protecting market competition.
The President reappointed Divinagracia as deputy director general for operations.
Divinagracia is also an expert on Information and Communications Technology and a former consultant of the Civil Service Commission.
He earned his degree in chemical engineering from the University of St. La Salle and Master’s degree in Business Process Management from the Queensland University of Technology.
Others appointed by the President include Grace Fernandez and Leonardo Tapia Director IV at ARTA; Rhoda Caliwara and Lucila Tarriela as members of the TIPC, both representing the employers’ sector; Temistocles Dejon Jr. and Gerard Seno as members of TIPC, representing the labor sector; Debbie Torres as Director IV at DILG; and Jose Albert Barrogo and Luz Marcelino, both Director III, at the DA.
