Biz Buzz

Full disclosure?

This beautiful half-Pinay movie star and commercial model recently wowed her fans when she mentioned in an interview that her non-showbiz boyfriend once worked for an international financial newswire agency.

Understandably, her legions of fans were all impressed … except, perhaps, some fans in the financial world … who promptly looked up her boyfriend’s work history … and ended up scratching their heads.

Some of her banker fans, in particular, promptly rushed to the terminals of this financial newswire agency and looked up the name of her foreigner boyfriend. Search results: Zero matches.

So Biz Buzz asked around, and it turns out this guy had been going around town a few years ago selling ad space for the wire agency and its affiliated financial news magazine.

The guy would set appointments with officials of government agencies and corporations to solicit advertising placements, saying his group would produce special supplement sections for the magazine (on which the ads would appear).

He was, of course, not employed by these news organizations—maybe just a subcontractor or freelancer, at best.

It is usually difficult to get appointments with high-ranking government officials or captains of industry, but the guy had excellent marketing abilities, we were told. However, once word of the little operation got around, officials avoided him like the plague.

Our sources swear that our favorite movie star’s boyfriend was the very same person involved in the supposed ad selling effort… but was not connected with the company he claimed to represent. Ouch!

So was the guy completely honest with the movie star about his supposed employment at this news organization? Hmmm. Daxim L. Lucas

Sweet Yolanda

If there’s “Hot Pablo”—the brand for black pepper and chili-based food seasoning products that’s helping uplift farmers in areas ravaged by Typhoon “Pablo,” rehabilitation czar Panfilo Lacson hopes to introduce higher-value crops as an alternative to coconut farms devastated by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.”

Lacson, the chief of the Office of the Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery, said a resident scientist was now studying crop suitability in areas devastated by Yolanda (international code name: Haiyan). At the end of the day, Lacson sees no need to weep for the ravaged coconut farms.

“We’re so fixated with coconut but we found out from scientists that only 10 percent of the area (in the Yolanda corridor) is suitable for coconuts, so why insist on planting coconuts?” Lacson said, adding that it would take about five to seven years for farmers to benefit if the damaged farms were re-planted with coconut trees. “Why don’t we go for high-cash crops or high-value crops?”

The good news is that there are 23 varieties of crops found to be suitable to the soil in this corridor, including cacao, ginger and lanzones. “So we’re encouraging local government executives not to push for coconut. Walang yumaman na coconut farmer (no coconut farmer has ever become wealthy),” he said.

For Lacson, the goal would be to replicate the success of “Hot Pablo” as these chili pepper brand is now being exported to the likes of Brunei. “President Aquino is very happy because the destruction turned into opportunity. Yield from pepper is about P90,000 per harvest so the farmers are so happy that they have forgotten about coconut,” he said.

So if there’s “Hot Pablo,” his team is trying to find a new winning agricultural product from the Yolanda corridor—one could be labelled as something like “Sweet Yolanda,” Lacson said. Doris C. Dumlao

Crimson Boracay

The Filinvest group has broken ground on Boracay Island for its third hotel property under its homegrown brand, Crimson. This 190-room beachfront hotel-resort will rise along a private cove shared with Shangri-La and Club Panoly.

The project may be finished by 2016, Filinvest Development Corp. chief executive Josephine Gotianun-Yap told Biz Buzz on the sidelines of the annual stockholders’ meeting of banking arm East West Bank on Friday. Some of the rooms are suites and can thus accommodate more occupants like entire families.

The group is investing around P2 billion for the hotel project on the resort island. The first Crimson hotel is in Mactan, Cebu, while a second in 2012 in Filinvest City, Alabang.

Meanwhile, the Filinvest group—though heartbroken after losing out to the Megawide-GMR consortium for the Mactan airport rehabilitation project—is not giving up on the government’s public-private partnership (PPP) program.

Yap said the group would still look at some of the PPP projects in the pipeline.

“We never say never,” she said. Doris C. Dumlao

FEU High

Starting 2016, Far Eastern University will offer basic education in its main campus on Morayta (Nicanor Reyes Street, Manila) in line with the country’s shift to the K-12 educational system.

The FEU board of trustees recently approved the incorporation of a new subsidiary to be known as “FEU High School Inc.”

FEU chair Aurelio Montinola III, who is also one of the incorporators of the subsidiary, explained in a text message that the new unit would start offering Grade 11 in Morayta by 2016. “This will add to the existing high schools we have in FEU Silang [Cavite] and FEU Diliman [Quezon City],” said Montinola, who is now making the most out of his senior citizenship years by helping his mother run the family-led FEU (after retiring as president of Bank of the Philippine Islands).

The K-12 education program requires at least a year of kindergarten education, six years of elementary education and six years of secondary education. Secondary education will now include four years of junior high and two years of senior high school education. Doris C. Dumlao

Sicat @ Brown U

On the eve of the long Lenten break, Philippine Stock Exchange president Hans Sicat was in the United States making a pitch before Brown University’s Socially Responsible Investment Fund, whose mission is to invest $30,000 of university money under both rigorous financial and social criteria.

Based on a copy of his slides, Sicat of course highlighted that the PSE is only one of the two exchanges in the world that had eked out growth in the main index for five consecutive years (since 2009). And the winning streak has so far continued this year. Sicat also discussed measures undertaken by the bourse to improve liquidity— such as the rollout of PSETradex, the online trading platform to allow trading participants to offer online trading without having to invest a much bigger amount to develop a proprietary system. Another measure is the introduction of broker anonymity, which is in line with the global practice to attract more participants.

Sicat is probably only too glad to talk before this fund because his own daughter is enrolled in this Ivy League university. Doris C. Dumlao

E-mail us at bizbuzz@inquirer.com.ph. Get business alerts and a preview of Biz Buzz the evening before it comes out. Text ON INQ BUSINESS to 4467 (P2.50/alert).

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