Second of Two Parts

Forbes magazine has been the definitive listing of the billionaires of the world and of each country. Yet wittingly or unwittingly, Forbes in its 2016 roster helped conceal from public view Anthoni Salim, the newest, yet hidden, oligarch in the Philippines.
While ranked as among Indonesia’s three richest individuals in the past several years, Salim vanished from its 2016 lineup. However, the regional magazine GlobeAsia ranked him as the second richest Indonesian in 2016, with $11 billion in net worth, just below the wealthiest Indonesians, the banking and tobacco-based Hartono brothers, with $14 billion.
The net worth of Salim’s shares in PLDT, Metro Pacific Investments Corp., Philex and Meralco alone is about $4.5 billion. That would make him — if Forbes ranked him among the country’s richest — No. 3 richest magnate in the Philippines, the only foreigner in the list. Yet, he has built and continues to run his conglomerate by remote control as it were, with his executive Manuel V. Pangilinan portrayed in the public mind as its principal owner.
Salim is also the youngest by far at 67 and the newest, overtaking such magnates (in the Forbes listing) as David Consunji, Manuel Villar, the Ayala-Zobel brothers, and even Enrique Razon, in just a decade.
Is it another success that should be credited to Salim’s PR machinery in keeping him unknown to the world?
Or were the Forbes editors incredulous that a huge chunk of an Indonesian billionaires’ wealth is not in his home country but in another? Indeed, in the history of Forbes’ roster of the world’s billionaires, Salim is the only such tycoon, much of whose wealth is in a neighboring country, the Philippines. Such has been the sorry state of our country. Don’t you think that means something terribly wrong is happening in our nation?
Salim’s main sources of wealth in the Forbes and GlobeAsia listings have always been reported as Indofood (the world’s biggest noodle maker) and First Pacific.
But First Pacific’s reports show that its profits from PLDT totaled $2.4 billion from 2000 to 2015, its biggest profit-earner, with that of Indofood at $1.5 billion. This is hardly surprising: PLDT is mostly in the mobile phone industry now, the most profitable sector in the past decade, and a near-monopoly, accounting for 70 percent of mobile and fixed-lines phones in the country.
Pangilinan’s “corporate citizenship,” as discussed in the first part of these series, is indeed admirable, a quality so much needed in a country ruled by oligarchs, who view the Philippines merely as a country where they make profits, and not their real nation.
There is obviously, however, a big ulterior reason for First Pacific’s huge public relations campaign to portray Pangilinan as a tycoon with a high sense of civic duty, one who spends hundreds of millions of pesos on philanthropy, social causes, sports and the academe.
This is to etch, falsely, in the mind of Filipinos that Pangilinan owns the First Pacific conglomerate, concealing the reality that it is tightly owned by an Indonesian magnate, in violation of constitutional provisions limiting foreign capital in public utilities.
We need, of course, foreign capital especially in areas where Filipino capitalists could learn from their technology.
But Salim’s investment in the Philippines is mostly in public utility firms, in which the Constitution limits foreign capital because these exploit natural resources (the radio spectrum in the case of cellphones) and monopoly features (as in the case of Meralco and tollroads), which should be reserved for Filipinos, or for the state itself. No Asian nation, in fact, allows such dominance by a foreign magnate of its telecoms, power, and other public utility firms.
Such control, has, in fact siphoned off from the country much needed capital: From 2000 to 2015 Salim and the other mostly US shareholders in First Pacific have received $8 billion in profits from PLDT and MPIC alone. This is equivalent to the amount of net foreign investment inflow the country had received in six years.
If you think that this is merely capitalism at work, check out the court records in which respected taipan Alfonso
Yuchengco testified under oath that then President Estrada threatened him in 1998 to throw his son in jail on trumped-up illegal-drug charges if he didn’t sell his PLDT shares to Salim. (That case also certainly debunks the argument that we need foreign investment because we lack capital. Yuchengco wanted to organize his consortium to buy out the Cojuangcos.)
Check out the several accounts, including that in the book of incumbent Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay, Jr., in which he claimed Estrada got P3 billion in illegal income from First Pacific’s takeover of PLDT. *
Harry Stonehill
The last time in Philippine post-war history that a foreigner wielded such economic and political power in the country was in the 1950s, when a former G.I., Harry Stonehill, built a conglomerate of cigarette, glass and cement manufacturers. His net worth was estimated at $50 million at the time, equivalent to $400 million today.
That’s peanuts compared with Salim’s estimated assets in the country of $4.5 billion, based on the value of his shares in PLDT, his infrastructure holding firm Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) and Philex Mining.
(Stonehill became the subject of a sensational congressional investigation in 1960, which exposed his bribery of top government officials in order to build and maintain his empire, and was subsequently deported.)
A recent article by the respected London-based The Economist magazine defined “cronies” as billionaires heavily involved in “crony sectors,” or those “vulnerable to monopoly or heavy state involvement.”
“They are more prone to graft, according to bribery rankings produced by Transparency International,” the magazine explained. The Economist is saying that one would be so naive to believe that giant companies engaged in public utilities in developing countries are regulated strictly according to the rule of law, and operate at arms’ length from the incumbent political rulers.
Out of the 10 such “rent-seeking sectors” the magazine listed, Salim’s conglomerate in the Philippines is based on three of these: telecoms, utilities and infrastructure. Salim, in fact, is the only billionaire in the Philippines whose conglomerate is deeply engaged in public utilities and infrastructure.
Going by The Economist’s definition of “cronyism,” therefore, Salim is the biggest and newest crony capitalist in the country now.
The Salim conglomerate’s expansion into infrastructure projects last year together would explain The Economist’s finding that the Philippines’ ranking in the crony-capitalism index worsened from fifth in the world in 2014, to third this year, after Malaysia and Russia. Marcos had cronies, but Filipinos. Now we have, going by The Economist’s definition, an Indonesian crony?
What bolsters such appellation is that Salim’s conglomerate made major breakthroughs in each of the past four administrations, which could not have been undertaken without each government’s active participation:
Under Fidel Ramos’ administration, Salim’s consortium won the prized Fort Bonifacio property project, backed by state institutions, beating the group led by the country’s old-elite Ayala clan. Salim would have captured San Miguel Corp. had Ramos moved just a bit earlier in lifting the sequestration of coco-levy shares in the food and beverage conglomerate, which is the biggest in the country;
Joseph Estrada very actively assisted Salim in capturing PLDT from the Cojuangcos, even removing the SEC chairman at that time, Perfecto Yasay, Jr. who raised questions over the buy-out. PLDT became Salim’s launching pad for his rapid expansion in the country in the next two decades, with PLDT funds even used to take over Meralco and build a media empire;
During Gloria Arroyo’s administration, Salim acquired the power-distribution monopoly, Meralco, from the Lopez elite, which became its base for expanding into the power sector. Salim also captured in 2009 the country’s biggest gold producer, Philex Mining, with the crucial help of the Development Bank of the Philippines.
Under Benigno Aquino 3rd, the Securities and Exchange Commission defied Supreme Court decisions in 2011 and 2012, which could have stopped or even closed down Salim’s operations in the country as he was in violation of constitutional limits on foreign capital in PLDT. A Supreme Court decision in 2014, made final and non-appealable in 2015, ruled that corporate-layering schemes such as that which Salim uses to conceal his foreign ownership of local firms is unconstitutional. Yet, the decision has been ignored by the SEC, the very agency tasked to enforce it. Under Aquino’s watch, the Salim conglomerate has grown rapidly to include the largest infrastructure investment management and holding company, running even the country’s longest toll-road network.
Will President Duterte prove different?
First Pacific’s mechanisms for extracting profits from the Philippines are exactly the same as those used by capitalists from the superpowers in the last century, a form of exploitation called neocolonialism.
But now we suffer from a neocolonialist who is not even from a superpower, but from a neighboring country that is not even superior to us but stands at roughly the same economic level where we are.
What kind of a country have we become?
* * *
*These are explained in detail in my book Colossal Deception: How Foreigners Control our Telecoms Sector — A Case Study of Corruption, Cronyism and Regulatory Rapture in the Philippines. Order at rigobertotiglao.com/book.
tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
ibig sabihin pala niyan si manuel v. pangilinan ay isang puppet ni salim na kunwari siya ang nagpapalakad ng mga multinational corporations pero ang totoo isang indonesian corrupt magnate ang nagkokontrol dito, bale siya din ang nagkokontrol sa indonesia at dahil sa pagiging ganid niya siya ang “rothschild of asia”. dapat din silipin ni duterte ito kung bakit si salim ay naasar sa kanya.
where now is the 60/40 rule on investment?who will implement the needed action?how soon?
How much did the MVP group donated to the campaign kitty of Pres Duterte? If they proved to be a major contriibutor, then it only means that their glory days are here to stay.
Talagang ang mga ankan ni Aquino at KKK niya dapat barilin. Mga magnanakaw talaga. Ito rin dapat pakialaman ni Duterte!
Most new Ateneo buildings are donated by MVP-Salim group. That means Ateneo tolerates Indonesian and Aquino corruptions, yet very critical against Marcos and Duterte. Hypocrite Ateneo officials and workers who are pro oligarchs, pro-MVP, pro corrupt Indonesian, pro criminally negligent BS Aquino and his administration. Shame on you.
they are worst than the drug lords then?
and should we deal first?
but if we don’t do anything, then what kind of stewfed have we become?
Some years ago, Japan was into automotive and steel industry (biggest industry) in South Korea. They were the exclusives in these industries. But you know, the Koreans being a patriotic people, kicked the Japanese out after they have gained the technology and operated these industries themselves. So now, they proudly and successfully manage their economy and had risen to become a 1st world country. It is never too late to kick out all foreigners who own major industries here in our own country and allow the Filipinos to own them by selling shares. Meantime, these politicians who sold our country to foreigners, (I am so angry at these politicians) should be charged with treason and be sentenced to die by a firing squad.
Thank you Noynoy Aquino administration! Thank you for allowing foreigners to takeover majority stocks in the Philippines thus giving them control over public utilities. Thank you for alerting the Filipinos and the UN over China’s encroachment when it was almost finished and not before! Thank you for protecting your cabinet ministers over their shoddy work that frustrates millions of us ordinary citizens in our daily lives. Thank you for turning a blind eye and allowing the Dept. of Justice head to form an alliance with druglords – your concern for the well-being of the Filipinos is admirable!…You and your cronies have truly enriched your pockets to heights unseen by mortal men – congratulations! We Filipinos should commend Noynoy Aquino’s leadership and give him a place in the Libingan ng mga Bayani for such a job well done.
Makes one nostalgic for the Marcos years when Filipinos owned the Philippines.
Good Job Salim! good job!! do the best!!!
Thank you for the enlightening narrative. This so sad.. The Dummy being used. The politicians on the take. The elite businessmen wanting to keep the status quo to preserve their vested interest. Historically, we have been suppressed and oppressed. Hopefully we can spread this kind of information. The truth will always set us FREE.. WE need to take steps to correct this inequity and right the wrong in our society.
So, all that needs to be done by Du30 is to implement the 2015 Supreme Court ruling currently being ignored by the SEC in a manner that would not create tsunamis in our economy. Salim’s interests would then be taken over by Du30 favoured individuals.. I suggest Du30 and Mr Yasay together with our top ranked economists formulate a transparent system of administration for Salims excessive assets in the country. MVP has to be called to account for his doings.
It is sad that our own government leaders are facilitating the rape of our country.
And this Pangilinan who I thought was a patriotic Filipino is in fact a DUMMY OF A FOREIGNER- a traitor to the country.
May God punish these criminals, these traitors to the country!!!
Yes, he is.
I am perplexed with events that had developed but abated, the giving away of our infrastructures not only to our local dogs but also to the foreigners through dummies. The proliferation of illicit drugs that destroys the fabric of our society. All these engagements by our politicians is an act of disloyalty to our country. The very personalities who committed these acts are still holding imfluencial podition in our governemnt. To clean the mess that huge is a timeless effort needed before you can even say its beyond the threshold of reccurrency. The enormity and the overwhelming gravity of mind blowing occurrence can make one think of raising the flag of surrender but it can be done also with extreme measures regardless who get hurts and be counted as one of the casualty in the process. One of the extreme measure also is to declare a revolutionary government and purged the irrelevant structure of the governemnt.