Tag Archives: oligarchs

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

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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kultura

Film, art in a time of change

AFTER a good seven years of doing the arts and culture beat, writing reviews, doing cultural assessments, I have surprised even myself that my interest seems to have dwindled.

It’s not that nothing’s going on, as it all just seems secondary to the state of the nation, the urgencies of which cannot be overstated at this point in time. When you don’t have a government that delivers credible information, and no opposition that provides an alternative ideological viewpoint, and all you have is social/media caught up in troll discourse, trends, and hashtags, there is little energy left for arts and culture.

Until you realize that it is exactly the chaotic, confusing, out-of-control state of the nation that highlights as well the state of the arts–its crises of patronage politics and parochialism included. (more…)