Friday, December 4, 1998
AS early as a week ago last Friday, Cathay Pacific already indicated to the Philippine Airlines that, at least from the side of Cathay Pacific, the talks virtually have broken down.
The CEO of Cathay Pacific himself, David Turnbull, wrote a letter to PAL Chair Lucio Tan, saying that Cathay Pacific's position to take "full management control" of PAL was actually also the position of PAL's creditors— mainly those abroad.
So what's that? No Cathay Pacific in PAL, no restructuring of PAL's debts? Tsk, tsk, tsk. What will Wrist Bank look to the public, after all that chest-beating about how good and macho and he was, in his handling of the PAL crisis.
For this is the scenario I fear most. Of course, PAL will still make its most critical move by next week and it will get a SEC approval for a rehabilitation plan. In the end nevertheless, without the support from its creditors abroad, PAL will have a rehab plan but it has no airplanes. Okay—very few airplanes.
THAT'S probably the reason why Lucio Tan himself, I heard, tried to patch things up between his own people in PAL and those sent here by Cathay Pacific. Tan supposedly asked Cathay Pacific to come back to the negotiating table.
It seems that some top men in PAL management found some of the 60 or so people of Cathay Pacific, who were doing a full management audit of PAL, aggressive and arrogant.
All that may be true. Success, to me, such Cathay Pacific's breeds its own form of arrogance. In the same vein, failure, like PAL's, builds its own form of insecurity.
From what I gathered anyway, it was Cathay Pacific's CEO David Turnbull himself who informed Lucio Tan about Cathay Pacific's final – really, really final – position. And that is, PAL management did not want a tie-up with Cathay Pacific. Period. Pffft went the talks.
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