Category Archive for: business

komentaryo

InSecurity Bank #bankingcrises

Across the holidays, and until now, we saw a rise in even more stories of OTPs being requested out of nowhere, and scams happening through and across our banking system. It seems important to finally talk about my own story from early 2023, one that I feel is important to serve a public that is generally at the losing end of problems like this one which, by the way, is not necessarily the subscriber’s fault. Note too that I had the privilege to have legal assistance, and my lawyer had quickly sent word to the bank to contest their decision not give me back the money I lost.

That bank being Security Bank.

For a bit of context, I hold accounts across BDO, BPI, Metrobank, and Security Bank. This is not a measure of how much cash there is (haha), as it is a measure of how much interbank transfers cost (a whooping P25 pesos, at least), which is huge if you get, say, P900 peso cheques for your writing.

Now let me start by saying that across all these four banks, for the longest time, it was Security Bank that was my favorite. I thought it was the most secure bank across all the others I had. They call you to tell you when your ATM’s been cut because of questionable activity, and then tell you when the new card’s ready for pick-up. I had family who believed in Security Bank’s, uh, security, and I even got insurance with them because of it. It was for that reason that I also had most of my savings there, and have had it there for years. It’s also important to point out that when friends started to experience unauthorized transactions from other banks pre-pandemic, none of it was happening with Security Bank. So it was easy to believe that, well, it was secure.

Until it wasn’t. Early in 2023, when other banks already had multiple cases of OTPs being asked for by mobile numbers not connected with the banks themselves, I received a phone call that talked about my Security Bank account. The person knew all my details with the bank, including the last four digits of my account, the last time I did an online transaction, the last time I did a face-to-face bank transaction, even who I talked to in the bank to get my insurance. There was no reason to think this person was not from Security Bank. But here was the clincher: when the person asked for an OTP, it was not sent to my mobile number through an unknown or regular mobile number — which would have made me suspicious. Instead the OTP was sent through the number of Security Bank. The same one that sends me confirmation of my online transactions, the same number that sends OTPs. (more…)

komentaryo

George Ty tales: One estate, two names, five children

It’s become interesting the reactions I’ve gotten for deciding to talk about George Ty’s estate controversy. Some have come in the form of links and screencaps from anonymous sources; some are asking questions about who his real wife is. But my favorite is a long-ish comment on this page telling me basically that I’m making a mountain out of molehill, that it’s all much ado about nothing, my questions about why George Ty’s declared estate is but a fraction of his P700-billion-peso net worth before he died. According to this comment, it’s all very simple: George Ty had time to transfer his estate to his different children and business interests, and therefore the declaration of but P3 billion is all possible, and legal, and above ground.

But see, here’s the thing: I’m not even asking about possibility or legality. I’m asking about why it’s even allowed. I’m asking about why it’s even being done. After all, just because something can be done, doesn’t make it right.

Here’s the other thing: telling me not to look into something just makes me want to dig deeper into exactly the same thing. And in the case of George Ty, it’s a wonder what simple Google searches yield, given what is a seeming news blackout from around February 2019 to the present. Layer this with being told this is a non-story, and so many sources sending questions and screencaps, and one cannot help but think that there really is more to this than meets the eye.

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komentaryo

George Ty’s estate: How the wealthy can get away with anything

It surprises me that no one seems to care — or is there a news blackout? — on the crisis of the George Ty estate. After all, we’re talking a conglomerate that has its hands dipped in insurance (AXA Philippines), transport (Toyota), banking (Metrobank), and real estate development (Federal Land), not to mention education (Manila Tytana Colleges) and energy (Global Business Power Corporation). GT Capital also has major stakes in Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC), which builds roads and tollways.

And while one might like to think that these are private businesses anyway, and therefore none of us should care about what happens to it, that would be small-minded of us. Obviously, this means thousands of jobs on the line. We should also be looking at all the public projects of GT Capital, the ones that it was able to get traveling with Duterte on his official visits to countries like Japan. And let’s not even start about the thousands of Metrobank and AXA Philippines clients, the properties being developed by Federal, the subscribers of Global Business.

It’s also a surprise, that for a President who insists that he is against the abusive rich, the wealthy, the elite, and whose propagandists insist that he wants to tax the rich more than the poor, that Duterte has fallen silent on the Ty’s estate-in-crisis.

George Ty died with a net worth of $3.4 billion dollars as of a June 2018 publication. That’s approximately P174,589,025,357.36 pesos, read: P174.5 BILLION PESOS given current exchange rates. But as of this report, whoever’s holding Ty’s will is  is only declaring his estate to be worth P3 BILLION PESOS.

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komentaryo

Why this silence surrounding George Ty’s estate-in-crisis?

I rarely — if at all — care about the movements among big business and oligarchs, except when they are in cahoots with government and China to push for anti-people policies, and of course when the issue at hand is one that is about oppressing workers, demolishing the urban poor, and / or violating basic rights. And in this country, we’ve got a lot of that.

But this bit about what has happened since George Ty’s death in November 2018, via Vic Agustin’s Money Go Round column in the Inquirer, piqued my interest. On the surface, and admittedly, it was this narrative of two wives — one Filipino, one Chinese — that made it hard to ignore. (One wonders why Mother Lily isn’t making this into a Mano Po film yet, harhar.) But a bit of research on Ty, and one realizes that what has actually hung in the balance since Ty’s death are far more important: (1) thousands of Filipino jobs, (2) billions of pesos in people’s investments and savings, and (3) the national and global business conglomerate of the ninth richest man in the Philippines.

Even more surprising? If not suspicious, is how it seems like it’s being kept quiet, this whole Ty Estate crisis. Because after it filled mainstream news in February 2019, suddenly there was complete silence about what’s been going on. Save for Agustin’s June 2019 piece, there is practically nothing. No credible status update about Ty’s estate, a silence that puts at risk everyone that works and invests with GT Capital, but also puts at risk the credibility of the whole Ty conglomerate.

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