Romulo describes job & Sikatuna

Two things SSS managers must show us, their 23 million members, before they even think of raising our mandatory contributions to 14 percent of monthly salaries:

• a complete financial record of the mutual fund, including how they spent our money and why they calculate it to tip over in 13 years;

• what they have done with trustees and officers who stole our money through behest investments in crony firms.

If they can’t do it, they can consider this option: return our money, close the SSS, and find work elsewhere.

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Roberto R. Romulo is on a roll. As Senior Adviser on International Competitiveness, he had recommended to President Arroyo the hiring of PR firm Burson Marsteller. It’s job, for $800,000 in one year starting July 2001, is to promote RP to the world. Specifically it must show that the government is worthy of credit; the economy, of confidence. When Mrs. Arroyo assented, Romulo said he would measure Burson Marsteller’s success if it could:

• lead to an invitation for Mrs. Arroyo to visit the US,

• generate high-level missions to the Philippines,

• increase defense security aid,

• improve RP’s image in the international press, and

• enhance the country’s credit rating.

"We have already met or exceeded each of these objectives," Romulo figures. George W. Bush met Mrs. Arroyo at the Oval Office last November. The US pledged $100 million in military aid, plus hundreds of millions more in economic grants and guarantees. Moody’s recently upgraded its credit rating of RP. The US-ASEAN Business Council is leading a huge investor delegation to Manila in March. RP has been in the news lately for its successful fiscal management and fight against terrorism.

Romulo could have added that the Manila stock market posted the highest recovery in the world. But that newsbit came only last weekend, three days after he reported all this on Feb. 6 to Sen. Blas Ople, chairman of the foreign relations committee.

Romulo was himself in the news lately. He reportedly had rankled Vice President and Foreign Affairs Secretary Teofisto Guingona for setting up a parallel department in his private office in Makati’s Sikatuna Village. There, subordinates from his days as President Ramos’s foreign affairs head supposedly still report to him. Guingona had confronted him about it during a Malacañang meeting with Mrs. Arroyo just before the US trip. The second-highest official reminded him that when his own dad, Carlos P. Romulo, was foreign minister, then-President Marcos’s brother-in-law Kokoy Romualdez had run a shadow ministry at Aduana in Manila’s Port Area. "I will never do that to you," Romulo assured Guingona.

Romulo reiterates so in his report to Ople: "No such (Sikatuna) office exists. It is purely the concoction of somebody’s fertile imagination." He explains that Mrs. Arroyo had tapped him as adviser in Jan. 2001, well before she nominated a Vice President and foreign affairs chief in March. Since then, "day-to-day operations (became) the exclusive responsibility of the VP/SFA," Romulo says. "With respect to appointments, the SFA has the final recommending authority."

Romulo adds that he advises the President on foreign policy only when asked. "Though I hold the office in the highest regard, I have not aspired and do not now aspire to be SFA," he says. "I already had the privilege of serving in that capacity, and I hope now to serve our people and our country in other ways, particularly in our quest for full economic modernization."

Romulo was worried about the reports on the Sikatuna office and his role in hiring Burson Marsteller – reports that prompted Ople to call for a committee inquiry. Up to this week, though, he would be in Canada for the APEC Business Advisory Council meeting. As head of the RP delegation, he can’t afford to miss it, and thus wrote to Ople.

Romulo gave Ople his job description as presidential adviser. Mrs. Arroyo had stated that it would cover foreign affairs, international trade, investment and finance, and information communications technology strategy. In turn, he formed an International Board of Advisers as sounding board for Mrs. Arroyo’s economic programs and targets. It is composed of bigwigs of multinational firms that operate in RP: Maurice Greenburg, chairman of the American International Group; Marcie Fuller, CEO of Mirant Corp.; Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon; Minoru Makihara, chair of Mitsubishi Corp.; Junichiro Miyazo, president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone; Gerard Corrigan, managing director of Goldman Sachs; Dr. Victor Fung, chair of Lin and Fung Group; Maarten van den Bergh, chair of Lloyds TSB Group; Dr. Stephen Zuellig, chair of Zuellig Group; and Anthony Bergmans, chair of Unilever. Together with Dean Laura Tyson of the London Graduate School of Business, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, and Dean Stephen Bosworth of Tufts University’s Fletcher School (and former US ambassador to RP), the board met for the first time on Feb. 3, on the last day of Mrs. Arroyo’s latest trip to New York. They gave her comments and suggestions on RP’s five-year medium-term development plan. Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir has had a similar board of advisers since the ’80s.

In forming the advisory panel, Romulo says he consulted with the private sector and the Secretaries of Trade, Finance, Economic Planning and Energy, and the Banko Sentral governor. But it is Guingona whom Romulo strives to appease in his letter. He describes their reported turf war as "imagined ... our roles are complementary, not conflicting."

"I have the highest respect for Vice President Tito Guingona, and his capabilities to serve our country’s foreign relations," Romulo writes, in effect belying reports that he wants him out. "(Guingona’s) decision to support the National Security Council on the RP-US military exercises, despite his policy stand over the years on US military presence, was an act of statesmanship that will be long remembered."

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