House-hunting

Bank notes 1: There’s talk that former Development Bank of the Philippines chairman Ramon Abad has been house-hunting in Alicante, whenever he and his best friend, Government Service Insurance System director Leonora de Jesus, have not been busy tasting all sorts of tapas and the town specialty, turrones.

It takes 90,000 euros to become an instant Spanish citizen.

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Bank notes 2: Philippine Savings Bank president and chief executive officer Pascual Garcia III isn’t exactly happy with Bank of the Philippine Islands president Xavier Loinaz. You see, Tito Garcia found himself out of a job when BPI – under the watch of Mr. Loinaz – bought the majority shares of Citibank and the Madrigal family in CityTrust Banking Corp. Mr. Garcia was a senior officer of CityTrust.

Mr. Garcia found himself in the cold – when the Development Bank of Singapore decided to focus its Philippines presence in BPI and let go of its DBS Bank commercial banking license.Mr. Garcia was president of DBS Bank.

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The office of Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay has been recently pointing fingers at Makati Commercial Estate Association, Inc. president Cesar Campos and vice-versa.

You see, small ground floor retail establishments (like coffee shops, convenience stores and flower shops) in the Makati central business district are going to be taxed P2,000 per square meter and the entrepreneurs want to know whom they should reason with (or, if that doesn’t work, whom they should pelt with thorny rose stems and other disagreeable items) before they close shop for good.

The tax, which is in addition to the lease, does not, of course, apply to those jeepneys cum eateries that are more or less permanently parked in the streets of both Legaspi Village and Salcedo Village.

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Philippine Townships, Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Jose Concepcion III has given the go signal to put up another upscale residential condominium building in Bonifacio Global City. The project is called the Fairways Tower because it overlooks the Manila Golf and Country Club.

The other Global City project of Philtown, a subsidiary of RFM Corp., is One McKinley Place. Now, that condominium project has done well, considering that the partner of Philtown then was Urban Realty, the real estate arm of Urban Bank which has since been jointly sold to Export and Industry Bank.

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Now, Maynilad Water System president and chief executive officer Rafael Alunan III is no longer interested in getting the 26-centavo increase in water rates. You see, Raffy Alunan reasons the increase isn’t going to make that much of an inroad in the company’s total.

What Mr. Alunan wants is for the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System to totally forget the concession fees which Maynilad hasn’t paid for the past two years. Here’s the nice part. Maynilad will then show the money due MWSS to its creditors as a sign that, well, it can meet its payments and can, therefore, can borrow some more.