Manila Times columnist Rigoberto Tiglao made a statement on April 2 what many readers have speculated on for many years. Tiglao wrote in his column that Manuel V. Pangilinan (MVP) is \u201cthe surrogate in the Philippines of Anthony Salim, whose family\u2019s wealth grew during Indonesian President Suharto\u2019s 31-year rule, mainly because the patriarch was the dictator\u2019s biggest crony.\u201d <\/p>\n
The columnist also wrote about Victorino \u201cRicky\u201d Vargas, who is in turn a surrogate of MVP in the Philippine Olympic Committee. \u201cIf \u2018surrogate\u2019 is too obscure a word, Pangilinan and Vargas are merely executives\u2014employees, minions and lackeys though are valid synonyms\u2014in the companies that Salim tightly controls: PLDT and the Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co., Ltd., the latter being the holding company for the Metro Pacific conglomerate in the country.\u201d \u2501Tiglao added. <\/p>\n
Pangilinan is a respected alumnus of Ateneo de Manila University and was granted a Lifetime Achievement Award during a Golden Jubilee celebration that he attended on December 2016 at the school\u2019s compound in Loyola Heights, Quezon City. Another awardee of the same honour was Senator Richard Gordon, a classmate of MVP. The awards ceremony was attended by this writer.<\/p>\n
Pangilinan is Salim\u2019s top executive at Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, Metro Pacific, Manila Electric Company (Meralco), Television Channel 5 and over three dozen Philippine companies the Indonesian tycoon allegedly controls \u2014 in a smart organisational structure that evades the Constitution\u2019s limit on foreign ownership of public utilities.<\/p>\n
Through First Pacific Bank\u2019s subsidiaries, Salim is the biggest stockholder of PLDT, holding 26 percent of its shares. Pangilinan owns a minuscule 1.6 percent of First Pacific and 0.1 percent of PLDT.<\/p>\n
Ricky Vargas was a Citibank Bangkok human resources executive\u2014an expertise that very rarely takes one to the top posts in the corporate world\u2014until Pangilinan recruited him into PLDT in 2007 as its personnel management head.<\/p>\n
The firm Vargas was assigned to handle where he stayed for five years, Maynilad Water, had not been a profit centre. First Pacific Bank has never reported any income from it. Vargas had hardly a track record that would catapult him in 2016 to being one of only three Filipinos with the assistant-director rank in Salim\u2019s holding and command-centre firm.<\/p>\n
The Philippine Daily Inquirer\u2019s article on Vargas\u2019 election as POC president read: \u201cVargas got a big morale boost from the presence of PLDT\/Smart CEO Manny V. Pangilinan, who immediately pledged P20 million as seed money for the POC.\u201d It reported nothing more though on Pangilinan\u2019s role.<\/p>\n
Pangilinan was even awarded \u201cSports Patron of the Year\u201d in 2010 by a sports writers\u2019 association. In 2011, he set up his \u201cManuel V. Pangilinan Sports Foundation,\u201d which he says supports basketball, boxing, cycling, taekwondo, badminton, tennis, running and football. At its launch, he gave a huge replica of a check for P80 million payable to the Philippine Football Federation, as the conglomerate\u2019s 10-year funding commitment to it.<\/p>\n
Pangilinan has also portrayed himself as a patron of the most popular sport in the country, basketball. Three First Pacific companies have teams in the Philippine Basketball Association. Will the companies headed by MVP suffer a similar fate like Rappler? Tough question that only Du30 can answer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Manila Times columnist Rigoberto Tiglao made a statement on April 2 what many readers have speculated on for many years. Tiglao wrote in his column that Manuel V. Pangilinan (MVP) is \u201cthe surrogate in the Philippines of Anthony Salim, whose family\u2019s wealth grew during Indonesian President Suharto\u2019s 31-year rule, mainly because the patriarch was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,49],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5048,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions\/5048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}