The chairman of Southwoods Golf and Country Club has vowed to call for a fresh round of elections for the organization’s board of directors, after a group of shareholders criticized the conduct of the group’s last annual meeting held recently.
More importantly, businessman Robert John Sobrepeña said he would not stand for re-election of the controversial golf club during elections, which he will call within 90 days of the next board meeting.
“To make sure that there is no doubt as to my intentions, I now declare that I am not seeking re-election at the next election which I promised will be called sooner than later,” he said in a letter distributed recently to Southwoods shareholders.
“Another election will be called 90 days from the next board meeting,” Sobrepaña added. “Our intent is to buy time to instill a club order, an election code, and conduct defining the proper garnering of votes for board seats.”
Located south of Manila, Southwoods—considered one of the most promising golf clubs when it was founded in the 1990s—has remained largely stagnant, according to a so-called “reform bloc” of shareholders, who blame the organization’s dipping fortunes to Sobrepeña’s group.
The reform group recently threatened to “take legal action” against Sobrepeña’s for allegedly making the organization’s annual meeting fall short of a quorum on purpose.
The move—where Sobrepeña registered only one of his 44 validated proxies during last week’s members’ meeting—was meant to make efforts to revamp the board fail, thereby allowing the chairman to remain in power.
In his letter, Sobrepeña defended his group’s decision not to register all the proxies they held—which resulted in the organization’s failure to conduct an annual meeting—saying that the efforts of the reformist members were “ill-spirited” and “attended with irregularities heretofore not witnessed in the election process of the club.”
“To site a gross irregularity, 159 proxies submitted by the so-called reform group block were forgeries,” Sobrepeña said. “This attempt to frustrate the will of the stockholders by resorting to forgeries simply cannot be countenanced.”
“It is one thing to aspire for a seat in the board or even to covet one but quite another to use dishonest means to secure that seat,” Sobrepaña added. “We felt it was our duty to insure that this type of ‘do anything to win’ behavior does not set a precedent that will then form part of our club culture in the future.”
The Southwoods chairman also proposed the adoption of an election code for the upcoming board elections in an effort to have a more orderly process, and appealed to the the club members to spare those who volunteer to run the organization from “personal attacks.”