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.
To me, no matter how they spin this as nothing more than two families fighting over inheritance, what we should be looking at is how this will affect the people who are not family. George Ty is not just any man who died after all. We’re talking GT Capital, with “directly-held interests Metrobank, Toyota Motor Philippines Corp., Federal Land, Inc., Property Company of Friends, Inc., Philippine AXA Life Insurance Corp., Metro Pacific Investments Corp., Toyota Financial Services Philippines Corp., and Toyota Manila Bay Corp.”
Among the businesses named in his estate are “Philippine Savings Bank or PSBank, Toyota Mortors Phils., Toyota Manila Bay Corp., Manila Doctors Hospital, Axa Insurance, G.T. Capital, Hyatt Hotels, Marco Polo Hotels, Federal Land, Pro-Friends Realty Corp.”
His investments cut across Asia. In China, he has grown his “Metrobank ventures in Nanjing City, the ancient Quanzhou City (which has jurisdiction over his ancestral village of Kiap-Tse in Yongchun county, Fujian province in south China.” GT Capital’s website lists some of Ty’s investments and partnerships across Asia and the world, from Japan to Hong Kong, even the USA and France.
A look at the publicly-declared assets and businesses of Ty’s conglomerate reveal his business’s hands dipped in public health, automobiles, insurance, land and real estate developments, hotels, and even energy and power.
This means people’s LIVES and EMPLOYMENT at risk, and investors, clients, and the general public’s savings in the balance, as Ty’s two families gear up for a battle for his estate.
Yet, interestingly enough, since March 2019, there’s been general silence about what exactly is going on. For a man who insisted that “integrity” is important, a man who believed that his business is about public trust, this radio silence about what is happening with Ty’s Estate doesn’t quite speak well of his family. Certainly it doesn’t build trust or confidence.
Here’s another important point that’s become obvious with the little that’s been written on Ty’s Estate. In the 2018 Forbes Richest Filipinos List, Ty made it to number 9, with a net worth of $2.9 BILLION DOLLARS. In June 2018, his net worth was pegged at $3.4 BILLION DOLLARS. Curiously, in news reports with regards his estate, the declared amount of as per his will ranges only between P2.7 to P3 BILLION PESOS. According to this Inquirer article, this is because he had transferred his assets before death.
But P3 billion pesos is quite a tiny fraction of Ty’s declared net worth in billions of dollars, isn’t it?
The Manila Times quotes George Ty himself from the Metrobank coffee table book:
<…> we should be able to build and protect a reputation that we are conservative, reasonable, and intent on consistently doing the proper thing. Sometimes, we let people know this philosophy by advertising, but we really count on what we call the ‘influence system,’ which means that if some people trust us, then more people will trust us. If more people trust us, then many more people will trust us.”
Trust. Reason. Doing the proper thing. Yet with this kind of silence surrounding his estate, when so many jobs and lives, and billions of pesos at stake, it seems this isn’t quite what George Ty’s family is interested in doing.
Which is fine, were this just about families fighting over inheritance. But it isn’t. Interwoven into this familial narrative is this one that’s about the employment, the savings, the investments of clients and business partners, in the Philippines and in different parts of the world.
And when so much silence surrounds Ty’s Estate seven months after his death, there is little reason to trust that everything is under control. ***