No, Bobby Cuizon wasn’t applying for an immigrant visa. He was working out the papers prior to the bank’s opening a remittance center in Sydney, its first in Australia. Since the bank is also opening its 31st US branch – this time, in Florida – next year, don’t get any ideas if you see Mr. Cuizon at the US Embassy either.
Like its 80 foreign branches/remittance centers (this first one, in New York, was set up in 1917, a year after PNB opened for business in Manila), the one in Sydney will employ Filipinos with legal papers to work in Australia and will, of course, service the growing number of Filipino working in that country.
Ed Espiritu has been security conscious even before he volunteered as the current treasurer of President Macapagal-Arroyo’s political party and even before he served for a year as Finance Secretary under President Estrada.
He’s been that way since he was president, first of the Philippine National Bank and then of Westmont/United Overseas Bank. (At that time, of course, that affectation was paid for by the banks he worked for).
The way Willy Parayno sees it, he isn’t so much squeezing blood out of dried turnips as going after plumb, occasionally overripe tomatoes.
Mind you, there are very few brave souls willing to argue with Mr. Parayno (who was shipped to Mindanao after he graduated from the Philippine Military Academy) when he tells you – quietly, at that – that you owe him money.
Then again, Lito Camacho has been taking a low profile these days after insisting that this year’s fighting target for the budget deficit stays and then having to admit that, uh, the deficit was indeed going to be wider.
And, of course, investment bankers still guffaw about that joke that foreign investors have stayed away because of the prospect that Mr. Camacho might leave government (his courtesy resignation was not accepted by the President) rather than because of that bothersome budget deficit.