Biz Buzz: Pointing fingers

IT APPEARS relations between some or all major shareholders of GMA Network Inc. and businessman Ramon Ang have deteriorated significantly, with the television network issuing subsequent statements explaining how talks broke down well into the evening of Friday.

The disagreement between both camps is now rooted on who walked out of the deal first: GMA’s Gozon, Duavit and Jimenez families or Ang, who is president of conglomerate San Miguel Corp. but was buying 30 percent of GMA as a “personal investment.”

Ang already spoke about how negotiations, lasting more than a year, with GMA’s owners were terminated abruptly via a stock exchange disclosure last week despite his interest to close the deal.

But GMA’s vice president for corporate communications Angela Javier Cruz said in their latest statement that Ang already “walked away” as early as March 26, 2015, “on grounds of alleged material changes in the company which are not valid and not borne by the facts and recent financial reports of the company.”

She went on to say that on May 18, Ang had proposed new terms that the GMA sellers later rejected—as well as any renegotiation—on June 22, or a day before they disclosed that the deal is over.

Both camps, which continuously alluded to certain unresolved matters, are obviously citing official documents but whose details they are unable to share because of a non-disclosure agreement.

What’s interesting, though, are rumors now surfacing that the three controlling families of GMA may not be in complete agreement with one another on this issue.

We haven’t confirmed that yet but based in GMA’s latest statement, Ang apparently had negotiations that did not involve all three families.

Specifically, GMA made mention of a share purchase agreement involving the “major shareholders as participating in the sale.” There was another document called a deed of absolute sale on the shares of the group of GMA chair and CEO Felipe Gozon “without the other groups participating.”

This was apparently suggested after what GMA’s statement described as a discussion between Ang and shareholder Menardo Jimenez.

Unfortunately, every new detail seems to raise new questions, and hopefully, a clearer picture should emerge soon. Miguel R. Camus

PhilHealth mess

PHILHEALTH has a lot of explaining to do these days, with its P1.76 million in unauthorized and unexplained bonuses having been flagged by the Commission on Audit (COA).

As such, the state-run health insurance firm suddenly engaged in an aggressive campaign to uncover and suspend various health facilities over allegations of fraud (to deflect attention?).

Notably hit was the Quezon City Eye Center, which was investigated because of claims of “seeking” or soliciting patients, with PhilHealth suspending payments while the investigation was ongoing.

It wasn’t a forced closure of the facility, but it had the same effect, given that more than half of the facility’s revenue comes from PhilHealth reimbursements for its procedures.

The eye center fought back with an open letter advertisement calling the attention of President Aquino and asking him to intercede in the dispute.

According to the QC Eye Center, PhilHealth’s allegation of wrongdoing was strange when one understands the process behind how the particular eye center, along with other similar health facilities, gets payments from them: Patients who are brought to them have to have forms approved by PhilHealth before they may be operated on—a safeguard that should have dispelled any doubt from PhilHealth regarding how the patients enter the center’s care in the first place.

In alleging fraud on their part, despite this prior approval, this also casts doubt on PhilHealth, which seems to have suddenly turned blind to the security that its practices are supposed to preserve.

Adding to this is a slew of recent PhilHealth regulations that would perfectly explain the surge in reimbursements, which prompted the allegations in the first place: Since 2013, doctors’ fees are now being coursed through the eye centers, when before it was only the operation fees.

Another reason the eye center pointed out was a regulation from PhilHealth allowing for both eyes to undergo cataract operations a day apart, when before, the practice was to wait for more than half a year after the first eye before the second could be done; a regulation allowing senior citizens to enjoy such benefits; a regulation lumping doctors’ professional fees in with the rest of PhilHealth’s payments to the center, when in the past these were separately allocated amounts.

Understand that all this is happening in the middle of a Department of Health’s anti-blindness campaign that has only begun to pick up in the last few years. Prolonging the de facto closure of the eye center, which performs more than 3,000 cataract operations a year, will set this program back, for who knows how long.

Thus, the clear losers are not the eye centers, but their indigent patients who need to pay only P16,000 an eye for a cataract operation, reimbursable by Philhealth, compared to P120,000 an eye in private hospitals.

Maybe President Aquino really should look into this issue. Daxim L. Lucas

Royal visitor

THE PHILIPPINES will play host to royalty this week with the arrival of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands today (Monday).

The 44-year-old Queen is the wife of the Netherlands’ current monarch, King Willem-Alexander, who ascended to the throne in 2013. Being a king’s wife in a constitutional monarchy is boring work if you want it to be, with governance left to parliament. But Máxima’s isn’t that kind of Queen.

The Queen, who was born in Argentina, has been keeping herself busy as a United Nations Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance and Development.

As it happens, the Philippines is a leader in the financial inclusion movement and the special advocate is visiting at the invitation of the government and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

Tomorrow, Maxima will be in Manila to discuss financial inclusion with representatives of international organizations and business. Later, she will visit the farming province of Cavite, where she will meet with clients and discuss the impact of financial services on their families and businesses.

On July 1, Queen Máxima will deliver a speech in Manila at the launch of the government’s National Strategy for Financial Inclusion. This government action plan, coordinated by the BSP, aims to enhance cooperation between departments, government agencies and the private sector to improve the population’s access to financial services. Paolo G. Montecillo

House-hunting by gender

WHEN it comes to house-hunting, women call the shots (or at least do the research work) in this country, which ranks high in global gender equality perception surveys.

Online property portal Lamudi, in a recent study, revealed that the Philippines was the only country in Asia where more women than men search properties online. It reported that 64 percent of online property seekers in the Philippines were women.

This was similar to the trend in Western countries where women were the primary users of real estate websites. In the United States, for example, 53 percent of people who sign up to buy or sell real estate online were female, based on figures from Realtor.org.

Lamudi said the Philippines joined Latin American countries Colombia, Peru and Mexico where women were emerging as the dominant decision-makers when searching for property online.

In contrast, onsite data from the website revealed that men accounted for the majority of users searching for real estate to buy or rent in the emerging markets.

In countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as many as three-quarters of online property-seekers were male. Masculine house-hunters also significantly outnumbered women in the online property search process in Ghana (where 68 percent of users were men), Tanzania (68 percent), Saudi Arabia (63 percent) and Senegal (60 percent). Doris Dumlao-Abadilla

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