What with the family jewels at stake and a horde of family and cronies hounding the Cojuangco clan for money owed to them by the insolvent Hacienda Luisita estate, fair to say the whole political circus going on is ultimately about money.
Will President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III come out of this drama laughing all the way to the bank?
Leni Robredo admitted to Mike Enriquez during a radio interview on May 9 that she owned stocks at Meralco. She also admitted that such had a value of 95k pesos in 1995. Robredo did not declare the value of these stocks, and while she declared owning stocks, the value of such is not listed in her SALN as an asset. Now after doing some crowd-sourcing and math, here is what I found out. I could not get the share prices of Meralco stocks in 1995. What I got thanks to Carlos A Jr Cortes is the value in 2000 which is 4 pesos per share. Using this, and this is even conservative since the price in 1995 must have been lower than 4 pesos, then Robredo owned at least 23,750 shares of stocks (95k divided by 4). The current share price of Meralco is 272 pesos per share. If we use this value, then Robredo has at least 6.46 milion pesos (at least 23,750 shares multiplied by 272 pesos per share) of assets which she failed to declare in her SALN. Using the Corona precedent, this is an i...
I was correct with my gut feelings. My friendly butiki, who listens to everything inside the executive offices of GMA7, confirmed that it was the network that paid for everything (repeat, everything) in the so called 'royal wedding'. It was over Php100m on the wedding day alone, not including other expenses in the pre-nuptial activities. This is an eye-popping amount if it is just a wedding expense (as I am one of those who think that a 20m wedding is already stupid and insensitive in a Third World setting, even if one could afford a 500m one). Over 100m, however, is a justifiable amount, even cheap vis-a-vis the ROI, if it is accounted as marketing and advertising expense of a large corporation that regularly spends much more anyway in their ads and promos. If the network has been able to project that their signature stars are bigger than those from competition, then they would have been able to deliver the message that GMA7 is the bigger kid in the block (don't get me...
The Philippines' "vice president" Leni Robredo is renowned for starting every statement with the phrase " ang sa akin lang naman " (in my humble opinion). As in something like this, for example... Ang sa akin lang naman, Martial Law in Mindanao won't be effective... Blah blah blah... And more of that to the same effect. What does Robredo's propose? Essentially nothing . The trouble with that is, Filipinos are all options but no roadmap . As such, Robredo mirrors the essence of the failure of the Philippine Opposition. They make a lot of noise about options (packaged as being "critical" of the administration) yet offer no pathway forward. It is hardly surprising why the Philippine Opposition led by the Yellowtards continues to fail.
Filipinos are renowned for being utterly unable to co-operate. Even within families they cheat and abuse each other. Nobody trusts anybody else for a very good reason: most Filipinos are untrustworthy. They’ll stab you in the back if they think there’s some short-term gain in it. This is a hole that’s very hard to dig yourself out of. Nobody can offer to help his neighbor, or his neighborhood, or his country, because he knows that sooner or later one of two things will happen: he’ll be slapped down for failing to conform to social expectations, or he’ll be ripped off so often that he’ll just give up. So exactly how do you suppose a strong, independent nation is going to be built upon that? It’s impossible. Strong societies are strong because they learn to co-operate among themselves. There’s nothing shameful about teaming up with others for mutual benefit: in other words, helping each other. But the Filipino sees everything as a power play. He cannot comprehend the idea...
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