Biz Buzz: Big John and the Maroons
TYCOON John Gokongwei Jr. plans to fully retire from JG Summit Holdings—the conglomerate he founded that is now a key industrial player in the Asia-Pacific—when he turns 90 next year. Succession is the least of JG Summit’s concerns as the tycoon is very happy with how his son Lance and his brother James Go have run the conglomerate since his retirement.
But “Big John,” as the tycoon is called, intends to remain an active chair of the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation. “That one, I’m going to keep,” he said last week in an informal chat at the sidelines of the opening of Robinsons Galleria Cebu, his group’s biggest shopping mall outside Metro Manila to date.
As everyone knows, the tycoon has given generous donations to some of the country’s top universities, particularly La Salle and Ateneo, since the turn of the millennium. “The next thing might be UP,” Gokongwei said.
One of Gokongwei’s daughters—Robina Gokongwei-Pe, the president of retail arm Robinsons Retail Holdings Inc.—had gone to UP for her college education and is a major corporate sponsor of the Maroons’ UAAP basketball team. It’s also Robina who has been arranging how the group could potentially help the premier state university, the tycoon said.
Gokongwei said he was supposed to meet with UP president Alfredo Pascual, but noted that he had not been feeling well in the last few days. He said that he might be able to do so after the holidays. “We’ll talk about it,” he said, when asked about details of the proposed donation to UP.
At his age, Gokongwei has nothing more to desire in terms of material things. He sports an Apple watch, but noted that this was only given to him as a birthday gift. Instead of buying anything for himself, he said he would rather just give his money to schools. Doris Dumlao-Abadilla
No height, no problem
WHAT does one do when one wants to build a luxury hotel but is constrained by building height restrictions?
Well, in the case of the SM group, that’s not a problem because they have enough space in their sprawling Mall of Asia complex in Pasay City to build horizontally.
We’re talking about their newest hotel—the Conrad Manila Bay—which is set to open early next year.
You see, structures built in the MOA area and adjacent environs have government-imposed height limits for safety reasons, thanks to the flight path of aircraft taking off and landing on the Ninoy Aquino International Airport’s Runway 13/31, which calls for the aircraft to fly almost directly over the SM MOA complex.
For land-starved developers, that would be a problem, but not for the SM group, which decided to build the Conrad hotel horizontally instead of vertically.
According to SM Hotels president Elizabeth “Betty” Sy, the new hotel will have 346 rooms (which is a big number for a hotel building) but spread out over only four storeys to account for the height limit. So SM built the structure sideward and chose to make the building look like a cruise ship when viewed from a certain angle—which makes sense, given that the building sits on the edge of Manila Bay.
Sy said the hotel’s structure (situated right across from the SMX convention center) is all but complete and work is now ongoing to make its insides look like the five-star hotel expected of a Conrad-managed establishment.
She said the interiors would feature a lot of local art, both paintings and sculptures, because Conrad insisted on giving its hotel properties a strong local flavor wherever it is in the world. “And the restaurants will be special,” she added.
So when will this brand new hotel be unveiled? The Sys declined to give an exact date because the Conrad management insisted on keeping these things under wraps, but it’s safe to assume that the ribbon will still by cut by President Aquino instead of the country’s next chief executive. Daxim L. Lucas
Speaking of which…
ELIZABETH “Betty” Sy, president of SM Hotels, is a proud grandmother but looks much younger than her age. This must be due to her thrice-a-week yoga and a healthy diet. She likes working in the kitchen and creates her own vegetarian meals.
Betty also sports a Fitbit fitness tracker band and aims to reach 10,000 steps every day. But she says that the only time she reaches this level is when she goes to the construction site of the future Conrad Hotel at the Mall of Asia complex with brother Hans Sy, the president of SM Prime Holdings Inc.
Since this is a sprawling hotel complex—versus the vertical formats of some other Conrad hotels in the region—the Sys are able to cover a lot of ground just by doing an ocular inspection of the property. That’s doing exercise while working.
The Conrad Hotel fronting Manila Bay—the group’s future flagship hotel—will be the first Conrad Hotels & Resorts-branded property (Hilton Worldwide’s global luxury hospitality brand) in the Philippines. Doris Dumlao-Abadilla
Insider-turned-scammer
REMEMBER that growing stock market scam that Philippine Stock Exchange president Hans Sicat had warned the public about last week?
Biz Buzz learned that the brains behind it was none other than a former bourse official who had been fired for violations, including misrepresenting himself to the public by giving stock market education seminars supposedly on behalf of the bourse—and charging a fee, of course, that went to his own pockets.
According to our bourse sources, this individual used to work with the PSE unit in charge of educating the public about the workings of the stock exchange in the hopes of enticing more people to invest their money in equities.
“He’s eloquent and was quite effective at his job,” said a ranking PSE official. “But before we knew it, he was already conducting his own seminars, using PSE’s name without authorization and charging an entrance fee to these seminars around the country.”
The bourse management only got wind of this former employee’s activities when someone congratulated a ranking PSE official about a recently concluded seminar in the province that was well attended. That was when the PSE decided to hire a private investigator to look into the activities of this former employee and eventually confirming that he was misrepresenting himself in his activities (including using the PSE’s paraphernalia in his seminars to make the event look official).
But it didn’t stop there. This individual had actually convinced many would-be investors to invest their funds with him personally, giving him total discretion on when and where to invest their money. He was fired from the bourse, of course, but not before having amassed an estimated P30 million in investments from gullible investors, many of whom were attendees at his seminars as well as his students at the college where he teaches.
More importantly, this former employee was able to file an appeal with the courts protesting his dismissal from the PSE—a costly activity, but one that seemingly gave him no problems, thanks to the resources he had amassed.
And here’s the worst part: Upon investigation, the PSE management found out that he wasn’t really investing the funds he gathered from clients in the stock market (because he had no record of investing with any of the PSE-member brokers). It was then that it dawned on the PSE management that this former employee was running a ponzi scheme, funding the returns of up to 30 percent he had promise his clients, with the funds of new gullible investors (who put in anywhere from P500,000 to P8 million, we hear).
Sadly, it doesn’t look like they would be getting their money back anytime soon. So the old rule still applies even in this day and age: Caveat emptor. Let the buyer (or in this case, the investor) beware. Daxim L. Lucas
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