The candidates: Villar

The most hurtful words hurled against her father, according to Camille Villar, are magnanakaw (thief) and coward.

Camille, the slim, 25-year-old corporate communications chief of the family-owned real estate company Vista Land, is obviously daddy’s girl. The only daughter of Sen. Manuel Villar Jr. and Las Piñas Rep. Cynthia Aguilar Villar, Camille accompanied her dad to The STAR office the other day for the launch of the newspaper’s series on presidential candidates. Cynthia Villar, who says Filipinos prefer low-key first ladies, was not with her husband.

Villar and his wife met when they were both students in the University of the Philippines College of Business Administration in Diliman, Quezon City. Villar has an MBA from UP and, like his wife, took a special interest in accounting.

Number crunchers are not like you and me. They tend to be savvy businessmen, and they tend to become exceptionally wealthy.

In a land known for the warmth of its people, number crunchers also tend to be considered lacking in charm.

Compared with some of his rivals, Villar is indeed lacking in this department. But since he’s not the only one with this natural deficit, the bigger issue being raised against him is his immense wealth, and the fear that he might use the presidency to unfairly expand further his fortune.

This is the issue underlying the controversy over the C-5 road deal, which Villar’s accusers say favors his real estate holdings in Las Piñas. Villar has denied any impropriety, commenting on the issue point by point, in public and online but never at the Senate. He has also answered accusations that agricultural land in Iloilo was converted illegally for his real estate development.

Because the accusations are being raised in the heat of a presidential campaign, establishing the validity of the charges may have to wait until a new president is sworn in at the end of June.

Many of Villar’s accusers belong to old rich families, and he’s trying to parlay the issue of his wealth into an asset. In his case, he likes to tell voters, he did not inherit his money but earned it, through sipag at tiyaga, diligence and perseverance.

His life story is not exactly one of rags to riches, but with beginnings that are humble enough: a boy from a lower middle income family whose current personal worth, as estimated by Forbes magazine, is $530 million. Even for some of the old rich Filipinos, the amount is staggering.

At yesterday’s exchange rate, that’s about P25 billion. If someone with that kind of money says he will write off his personal investment in a presidential campaign — about P2 billion by conservative estimates — and will not try to seek a return on investment if he wins, since his family is amply provided for with what’s left over, will you believe him?

It’s an unusual idea in a country where people see elective office not as an opportunity for public service but as a sure path to personal fortune.

The mayor of New York City, financial news media billionaire Michael Bloomberg, made a similar promise after spending $85 million of his personal fortune for his re-election campaign. New Yorkers didn’t seem to mind the huge expenditure; Bloomberg won a third term late last year.

In the case of Villar, we will know what Filipino voters think in May.

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Villar also invokes his immense wealth, aside from his public service record, when answering accusations that he is the true candidate of President Arroyo.

What, Villar asked me recently, could the President give him that he didn’t already have? He has the money and the organization, with one of the country’s two oldest political parties solidly behind him.

Why are Lakas-CMD-Kampi politicians supporting him? Because, he says, they have known each other since his days as a congressman, as speaker of the House of Representatives, and then as Senate president. He has cultivated personal political ties, he says, and he does not owe this to President Arroyo or anyone else.

Several months before Villar filed his certificate of candidacy last year, STAR editors sat down with him, during which he explained to us what his campaign strategy would be. From the slogan to the focus of his message, Villar is his campaign’s chief strategist, selling himself as if selling a consumer product, zeroing in on the target market.

These days he’s doing exactly what he told us.

The target market is the poor, though he’s also wooing the business sector, trying to allay fears of unfair competition that his businesses might present.

Basically, his message to the poor is, I was once like you and I feel your pain, and I can ease your misery.

Liberating people from poverty is also his long-term solution to corruption, which he considers an economic problem.

His other promise is leadership. “If there is no natural leadership, you have to buy everybody,” he told us the other day. “It’s going to be very expensive.”

That kind of leadership, he told us, “has not been felt” in the past nine years.

Villar says he is prepared to lead by example, even in his personal life. He told us that he has had only one girlfriend: the woman he married.

He is a non-smoker, he is a social drinker, and he has no vices. As one of his former college classmates once remarked, Villar the number cruncher has an unbelievably boring life.

Villar’s daughter Camille has no complaints. The best thing ever said about her father, she told us, is that he is “a good family man.”