Second of a series on the Salim Empire in the Philippines

WE’RE suffering not only from the rottenness of our political architecture, worsened by the unprecedented corruption in the current administration and Congress. Hardly figuring in the public discourse though is that fact that we are also being impoverished because of anomalies in the Philippines’ economic order.

One such aberration is the fact that an Indonesian magnate, Anthoni Salim, through his Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co., is the biggest shareholder, with 48 percent shares, of Meralco, the country’s largest power distribution firm with 8.2 million customers.

The national tragedy is that most Filipinos don’t even know that part of their monthly electricity bills have increased and will increase the wealth of Salim, Indonesia’s fifth-richest tycoon with a $14 billion fortune. Congress investigates so many “bs” issues that result in feeble or useless laws but dares not find out why an Indonesian tycoon is allowed to earn billions of dollars from a power-distribution monopoly in our country.

Partly due to the fact that electricity prices in the Philippines are the among highest in Asia — P12/kWh compared to Thailand and Vietnam’s P5/kWh — and Meralco’s policy of giving dividends to its shareholders every year equivalent to half its core net income, data from First Pacific’s annual reports indicate that it sucked out of the country a total of $1.5 billion (P93 billion) in profits from 2013 to 2025. Yet its CEO, Manuel V. Pangilinan, claims the firm cannot bear the cost of its system losses which accounts for about 6 percent of a customer’s electricity bill.

FORMER public works and highways secretary Rogelio Singson has revealed — the first time this has been made public — that the government had another public works budget called the…

HOW does the Filipino know what is happening in his country?

The answer has changed radically in barely a generation. Twenty years ago, Filipinos watched the evening newscast, listened to radio or bought a newspaper. Today they open Facebook, YouTube, TikTok or X. A Pulse Asia survey released this year found that 75 percent of Filipinos get news from Facebook. Television was cited by 64 percent, YouTube by 38 percent, radio by 27 percent and TikTok by 11 percent. Newspapers registered a pitiful 3 percent.

Those two numbers — Facebook 75 percent, newspapers 3 percent — encapsulate the biggest revolution in Philippine mass communications since television arrived. They would seem to announce the death of the newspaper columnist like myself; I think the opposite may be happening: the newspaper is shrinking, but the columnist has escaped from it.

First of five parts

THE Philippine Star marked its 40th anniversary on July 27 with an issue of unprecedented length of 216 pages, its motto prominently displayed: “Where Truth Shines.” However, the catchphrase that most accurately describes Philstar: “Where Truth Is Buried”: Not a single mention, out of the issue’s 500,000 words, of “Anthoni Salim,” the foreigner who is the paper’s ultimate controller. The Star has been hiding the fact that a Salim firm had accumulated a 51 percent controlling stake by 2014.

But it is not only the Star, one of the country’s two largest broadsheets, that Salim controls. The Indonesian governs over the largest and most diversified media conglomerate in the country, which includes its 76 percent shareholdings in the business paper BusinessWorld, a 20 percent minority interest in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, TV5 Network, Nation Broadcasting Corp., Cignal TV, and the country’s third oldest newspaper still publishing, the Cebu-based The Freeman.

Salim’s control of these media firms is in violation of the constitutional ban on foreign capital in media, although Salim has exploited legal loopholes to do this. Amazingly, no one, no administration, has questioned this anomaly defying our Constitution in court.

Anthoni is the son of Soedono Salim, the late Indonesian-Chinese billionaire who was strongman Suharto’s biggest crony, who had built a vast business empire in Indonesia.

After Suharto was overthrown after 32 years in power in 1998, one of his three sons, *Anthoni recruited Filipino Manuel V. Pangilinan, a Hong Kong-based banker, to organize and head his holding firm, First Pacific Co. While the first companies Pangilinan set up proved to be ill-fated ventures (e.g., Bonifacio Land, Steniel Manufacturing, and Metro Bottled Water), it was Pangilinan’s controversial capture of PLDT during President Estrada’s term that boosted First Pacific’s expansion in the Philippines.

FOR several days now, the impeachment prosecution panel against Vice President Sara Duterte has been struggling — quite obviously, unsuccessfully — to portray her as abusing her so-called confidential and intelligence funds* totaling P612.5 million. These were released to the Education department when she headed it and to her office as vice president, upon President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s orders when she was still on good terms with him.

For two days, a state auditor replied to the prosecutors’ leading questions, only to be debunked by Sara’s defense team. Senators have been given voluminous documents on disbursement vouchers, and nearly 2,000 acknowledgment receipts.Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the institutional machinery of the Philippine government has been fully, publicly mobilized to find something — anything — wrong in Sara’s P612.5-million confidential funds. Even very expensive private lawyers have been recruited for this. (Who pays for them?)

This is such a clear case of this administration’s weaponization of constitutional procedures — here the impeachment process.