Fridays Boracay in crisis due to land dispute
Screengrab from https://www.fridaysboracay.com/home2.do
MANILA, Philippines — Boulevard Holdings Inc. is bracing itself for losses due to a disruption in the operations of the resort hotel Fridays Boracay as a result of an escalating dispute with a member of the family that sold the lot where the resort stands.
Despite summer being the Boracay peak season, business at Fridays Boracay has “fallen off rapidly,” BHI chair and president Marcel Panlilio reported to the Philippine Stock Exchange on Thursday.
He alleged that “armed civilian men” led by Datu Yap Sumndad, a member of the family that supposedly sold the lot years ago, had “walled off” half of the restaurant, sent men armed with rifles to occupy 17 rooms in the hotel’s buildings, drained the resort’s pool and started walling the area with hollow blocks.
At the same time, Panilio sai,d Datu Yap has been looking for new buyers of the land after rejecting BHI’s offer to pay an additional P95 million in a peaceful settlement.
Panlilio said the resort’s general manager had left and its 150 staff members were “disheartened and saddened by the lawlessness.”
“From the usual P4 to P5 million in sales per week with P2 million gross profit per week, we are now down to almost zero in profit. Our projection of almost P40 million to P50 million in profits from Fridays, up from P25 million, will probably be a loss” for the fiscal year ending in May, Panlilio said.
Lately, Panlilio said, Datu Yap has been trying to sell the property to other potential buyers such as Rep. Ronald Singson.
“The directors and myself, now having been humiliated with the raw brute force, having witnessed the lengthy damage to our business and dismay of our employees from the failure of a quick peaceful settlement with the Yaps (just to buy peace) will no longer pay the additional P95 million plus tax for a property we already own. We purchased the property five years ago in a court settlement and it is final, executory, and non-appealable,” Panlilio said.
“We shall fight in court until the long arms of the law catch up with the squatters,” he said.
BHI paid P40 million to buy the property from Datu Yap’s parents previously, a deal which Panlilio said had been approved by court in finality in 2009.
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