Friends

Expect incoming Finance Secretary Margarito Teves to consult friend/mentor former Finance Secretary Jesus Estanislao in the coming months.

Upon the request of then Bangko Sentral governor Rafael Buenaventura, Jess Estanislao personally handled a mandatory corporate governance seminar (read: attend or face penalties) for all chairman and presidents of commercial banks, which included Land Bank of the Philippines chief executive officer Gary Teves.

As everybody knows, Mr. Teves was a member of Congress for nine years. In 1992, his name was initially included in the senatorial slate of then presidential candidate Fidel Ramos but was later dropped. (Six years later, then Finance Secretary Roberto de Ocampo ran for senator and lost).

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Did you know 1: Splash Corp. head Rolando Hortaleza has a cabinet-full of trophies but there are two trophies which are prominently placed in his office. One is the Ten Outstanding Young Men award. The other is the Agora Award given by the Philippine Marketing Association.

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Did you know 2: Friends of former Ayala Land Inc., marketing head Tristan dela Rosa can visit him in Vietnam, where he heads the Universal Robina Corp. operation.

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Did you know 3: ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. president Luis Alejandro may be giving out pink slips but he is hiring for certain critical positions left vacant for one reason or another.

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Next week’s annual stockholders’ meeting of Equitable PCI Bank is a crucial one, given the bank’s history.

As everybody knows, E-PCI is the merger of two commercial banks.

The buyer was Equitable Banking Corp., which was started by Go Kim Pah as a remittance service for Chinese-Filipinos who wanted to send money to their families in Fujian, China. (Yes, there was a time when Filipinos had Chinese nannies and the only overseas workers were those imported from China).

It was during the chairmanship of Mr. Go’s youngest son, George Go, that the bank partnered with the pension funds –mainly the Social Security System under Carlos Arellano – to purchase the joint majority shares of Eugenio Lopez Jr. and John Gokongwei Jr.

Messrs. Lopez and Gokongwei, in turn, acquired their PCI shares from the Development Bank of the Philippines, which extended loans that could be converted into equity.

Under an internal agreement, Geny Lopez and Mr. John agreed to always vote as one in the PCIB board until 2000 for several reasons, including the Romualdez factor.

For this reason, the family of former Leyte Governor Benjamin Romualdez has had a board seat even though the family’s shares are technically not enough to warrant a directorship.