Four, on the dot

Bank notes 1: Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co. chairman George S.K. Ty is such a stickler for time that board meetings – that’s every third Thursday of the month – starts exactly at 4 p.m.

That’s because all the directors are seated in the board room by 3:55 p.m. and are merely waiting for the clock to strike four. There are no stragglers and grand entrances at these meetings. <

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Bank notes 2: By this weekend, United Coconut Planters Bank president and chief executive officer Jose Querubin will most probably have signed up his new chief operating officer.

The COO is the first of the new senior management team that Jojo Querubin is bringing in. He’s also in talks for a chief credit officer and a consumer banking group head. The consumer banking head will be coming from a fast-moving consumer sector such as telecommunications.

These new hires are part of UCPB’s reorganization into a good bank and a bad bank that will hopefully make the bank more competitive within the five-year management contract of Mr. Querubin.

The good bank – whose only job is to generate revenues – will have three to four major groups. Aside from consumer banking, these are corporate banking and treasury, with operations providing the shared backroom. The good bank will be monitored on a day-to-day basis by the COO.

The bad bank – whose only job is to liquefy as much of the bank’s estimated P20 billion so that the money can be used by the good bank to generate more revenues – will be the responsibility of the chief credit officer, who will report directly to the CEO.

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Bank notes 3: It looks like some of the creditor-banks of the Lopez-controlled Bayan Telecommunications Inc. will have to wait a little longer to be fully paid.

You see, Pasig Regional Trial Court Judge Jose Hernandez signed a stay order last Aug. 8 that basically stops BayanTel from paying any of its creditors until a rehabilitation plan is worked out. The idea here is that all BayanTel creditors – and these include some very distressed investors such as Goldman Sachs – should be repaid fairly and equitably and not selectively.

Meanwhile, Conchita Manabat has been appointed rehabilitation receiver, after she posts, of course, a P1-million bond. Dr. Manabat is chairman of C.L. Manabat & Co. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and last year’s president of the Financial Executive Institute of the Philippines.

Now, here’s the interesting part. An initial court hearing has been set on Sept. 22. That’s when the merits of the rehabilitation plan proposed by the Bank of New York (as trustee for the Avenue Capital, which holds at least 25 percent of BayanTel’s $200-million 13.5-percent senior notes due in 2006 and which has not been paid its semi-annual interest payments since 2001) will be heard.