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.
How is this even possible? How can government let them get away with this? And what does this say about the richest and wealthiest in this country? Is this the way taipans and oligarchs get away with anything at all, including but not limited to displacing the urban poor, denying your workers just pay, and refusing to declare how much your estate is actually worth?
Here’s the thing though, Ty was big on integrity and trust. So it surprises that whoever’s in charge of his estate, that person thinks that the way to do it is not only to refuse to be transparent, but worse: to take us all for stupid, unable to see the gaping hole between $3.4 billion dollars and P3 billion pesos. Ty said:
But how to trust the conglomerate that Ty left behind, when it can’t even pretend it wants to declare the amount of his estate closer to the patriarch’s publicly-announced net worth? Certainly there is no reason to believe that the P174.5-billion- peso net worth could be so reduced to a mere P3 billion pesos? One wonders if his family can see that it is the trust and integrity that George Ty himself had held in such high regard that is being sacrificed here?
Also: what are they avoiding? The taxes they’d need to pay depending on how much the estate is? The reactions of other claimants to the estate?
Even then though, why take us all for blind, or stupid, including the SEC and the Courts, why declare so little of what the 9th richest man in the country is worth?
And what does it say given Ty’s engagements with government, and even global economies? As early as May 2017, Ty’s conglomerate would appear on official government websites as a key partner in infrastructure developments. Official government websites and press releases prove this Ty-Duterte government connection. Most recently, after the patriarch’s death, in May 2019, Mitsui & Co., Ltd signed an LOI with GT Capital to “develop the Philippine automotive industry.”
It seems the attitude for GT Capital and those who are in control of Ty’s estate is to pretend it is business as usual. That there is nothing extraordinary, nothing that should keep them from operating as normal. But when your own patriarch worked with notions of trust and integrity, but you yourselves are not transparent, you yourselves are being secretive, about the status of his estate, isn’t that reason for pause?
And what is the Duterte government doing about this? When it’s just failing to pay a lease on land such as the Prietos, when it’s just not running a campaign ad such as the Lopezes, the President is furious and vengeful. But isn’t the Ty Estate doing something that’s much worse?
In an event in August 2018, Duterte was quoted in a Toyota event, a partner of GT Capital: “This government will protect you and your investments and will ensure a level playing field where you will thrive as long as you follow the rules of the land.”
But declaring P3B of a P174.5B net worth is far from following the rules, isn’t it? ***
[…] George Ty’s estate is being allowed to get away with declaring that his estate is only worth P…; this was the richest man in the Philippine in 2018 with a net worth of P170 billion pesos. Imagine this discrepancy that this taipan’s family is being allowed to get away with, and everyone seems to be ready to let it slide, from mainstream media which has NOT covered this discrepancy, to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which accepted this July 2018 declaration). […]
Hi Katrina, usually I find you and Currents.ph to have incivisve commentary about issues, but I find that your “series” on George Ty has been completely uncritical. This is so much ado about nothing. Your first blog post on this is easily refuted — you based a lot of your assumptions on a Facebook post. None of that was verified information. It read like a gossip column with no real government documents to speak of. I chose not to comment on it because surely you would’ve seen, having had more time to let your arguments steep in your mind, that you were being irrational. Now you bring up his estate again in this post. Your points: (1) Mainstream media is not covering this issue, and (2) his estate being 3 billion pesos.
You are familiar with the procedure of court proceedings, right? Mainstream media is not covering this issue because it is a pending case and the matter is still before court. The sub judice rule applies. They are literally precluded from writing about this. There is probably a gag order out on this issue as we speak.
Next, I don’t know if you’re aware but people, especially people who have been sick for so long like George Ty has, can take care of their estates outside of a last will and testament. My own father, who was sick for so long, didn’t have much to give away in his own last will and testament because he already took care of dividing his estate before he died. If my dad, who was a businessman but of a much smaller scale, thought of doing this, don’t you think Ty, among the richest businessmen in the country, would have? Then at the end of his life, in his will, he only had 3 billion pesos worth of assets, cash, or liabilities to divide among his family. Put 2 and 2 together — the 163 billion pesos you want to account for has already been accounted for — they probably represent his companies you list in this same blog, which means they aren’t affected by the dispute over his last will and testament at all. It really only takes a google search. His sons and daughters and trusted friends head his companies now. There are boards of directors for each of them. There is no dispute over these companies at all. For a market share of Ty’s group of companies’ size, we can imagine that if there was a problem of ownership, we would have felt it by now. We’re feeling nothing, and not because we’re not reading about it in the papers, it’s because it’s been taken care of.
Again: much ado about nothing.