The Philippine Star
Sunday, December 6, 1998
By The Way
Max V. Soliven
I don’t get it.
During the Cory Aquino administration, multibillionaire Taipan Lucio Tan was harassed and sniped at as a “Marcos crony”. In the 1992 elections, Tan made the mistake of choosing to back the loser, former Speaker Ramon Mitra, Jr.
For the next six years, he paid for that miscalculation by being slapped with midnight cigarette tax increases designed to cripple his Fortune Tobacco, the building block of his massive “fortune,” so to speak.
When he committed the error of getting sucked into buying the plummeting government-owned Philippine Airlines (PAL), Tan didn’t get any help or sympathy from the Ramos government, which still had a substantial stake in the floundering airline, but had to cope with non-cooperation and setback instead.
In a vengeful mood, the Department of Transportation and Communications under former DOTC Secretary Jesus “Sonny” Garcia, abetted by a former PAL “consultant”, Vic Limlingan, through the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and the Air Transportation Office (ATO), gave PAL a hotfoot by merrily playing “Santa Claus” to many competing foreign flag carriers by awarding them a slice of the pie on PAL’s most lucrative and desirable international routes.
In the meantime, with FVR’s National Security Chief and Palace favorite, Gen. Jose T. Almonte, and his former Chief Presidential Legal Counsel, lawyer Antonio Carpio, in full cry against poor Tan, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) filed a mountain of tax evasion cases against Tan. BIR Commissioner Liwayway Vinzons-Chato invoking the aid of the Holy Spirit, sent her minions against Tan while her BIR agents and lawyers bragged that they had amassed “truckloads of evidence” to prove Lucio’s multibillion-peso tax finagling kuno.
The government, over the long-fought years, got absolutely nowhere, losing case after case. The “truckloads” of evidence, so toothily promised, turned out to be smaller than a jeepload, and even that looked like trash. Recently, both Finance Secretary Edgardo Espiritu and the new BIR Commissioner Beethoven Rualo admitted that they didn’t have much to throw at Lucio Tan.
Not so Justice Secretary Serafin Cuevas, the ancient lion of the Iglesia ni Cristo. Roaring that they were going to “get Tan,” the Justice Department’s legal beagles filed nine tax evasion charges against Tan, accusing Fortune Tobacco Corp. and nine alleged “dummy” corporations of having defrauded the government of P25.6 billion between 1990 and 1992. Cuevas, it seems, is determined to bust Tan down from Kapitan to kabo, or corporal. Boxed Private, even, I can only surmise.
The funny part of it all is that this time around, Lucio Tan had backed the right candidate. He had thrown most of his resources, we hear, into helping bankroll the winning campaign of President Joseph Ejercito Estrada. He was one of Erap’s most fervent supporters and advisers during the fight to topple the entrenched ruling party of ex-President Ramos, the Lakas-NUCD. Now what has he got? More harassment, court cases, tax evasion charges – and, most embarrassing of all, the “threat” of being arrested on the orders of a Marikina Metropolitan Trial Court.
* * *
Sir Erap, who should have stood by his friend, Lucio, has been backed into a corner, to bleat that there are “no cronies” and “no favorites” or sacred cows in his administration.
President Estrada has, often in the past, been accused of being “too loyal” and too supportive of his friends, “cronies” and drinking buddies. In the Tan case, this has been seen to be untrue. If anything, what two-fisted Erap of action-hero fame is demonstrating is pusong mamon.
And now that Cathay Pacific has pulled out of the negotiations to invest in the ailing PAL, because Tan didn’t cave in to Cathay’s demand that he dismiss 3,100 employees before any Cathay Pacific takeover, what’s the besieged Tan – who’s already lost P21 billion in PAL – to do? Say his prayers?
Let’s not forget that President Erap literally forced Tan, who considered himself well rid of the rambunctious and bellicose left-ridden unions of the airline, to reopen the airline he had closed with a vast sigh of relief only several weeks ago. Now what? PAL has 8,700 personnel left, about three times more employees than are required to efficiently run PAL in its straightened and constricted circumstances. Tan can’t afford to subsidize that load while the airline continues to hemorrhage badly. Something’s got to give.
In addition, Tan employs about 28,000 other workers, blue and white collar, executives and bankers in his other companies and industries. If he collapses under the sledgehammer blows of outrageous fortune and government nitpicking, who will give jobs to the almost 40,000 suddenly “unemployed”? That’s a complement bigger than the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the remnants of the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) combined.
The pity of it is that Tan has been painted as “the devil incarnate” and an “evil taipan” by a hostile media campaign over the past decade and a half. Anybody who speaks out for Tan and asks for justice for him almost automatically gets tarred as having been “bought” or on “the payroll of Lucio Tan.”
The strange part is that many of those who point accusing fingers were the ones who dipped into the well and drank deeply of the largesse from Tan’s leaky vat.
As for Sir Erap, can he, with a clear conscience, now do a Pontius Pilate? Tan went more than extra mile for him when he was the underdog candidate. That unfortunate fellow, perhaps, was under the false impression that “friends” stick together, having proved themselves in battle, through thick and thin.
Too bad. The hard way is not the Filipino way – it seems.
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