P300,000 per appearance

Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. president John K.C. Ng charges P300,000 for every ribbon-cutting or speech that he makes in any FFCCCII member association. The normal honorarium is between P3,000 and P5,000.

Never an eloquent speaker, Mr. Ng has raised at least P2.4 million from such personal appearances in the last six months.

The P300,000 is the cost of building one two-room school building, the pet project of the federation. In the past 40 years or so, the federation has built more than 2,000 school buildings.

These school buildings – the trend now is to build in the more remote areas in the country where they are better appreciated – are donated to the local government units.

By the way, it seems Mr. Ng will run for president of the federation next year. Under the federation’s by-laws, a president cannot succeed himself. Technically, Mr. Ng isn’t doing that since he is currently serving the unfinished two-year term of Benjamin Chua, Jr., who passed away middle of this year.

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Although the Philippines, developed the export market for coconut gel or nata de coco, it is now considered an Indonesian delicacy largely because they are the world’s largest and cheapest producer. Why, even adobo is being marketed in the United States and in Europe (at least, in England) as a Mexican dish.

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Dates to watch 1: The local stockholders of Asian Hospital have up to Dec. 6 to match the buy offer of Antonio Cojuangco.

Tonyboy Cojuangco wants to buy the 30 percent stake of Singapore-based vista in Asian Hospital for a third of the initial investment, He has also agreed to pump in another P400 million as fresh capital.

Assuming Mr. Cojuangco clinches the deal, the talk is he will rename the hospital after his late father, Ramon Cojuangco, in an effort to looses the purse strings held by his mom, Imelda Cojuangco.

As the widow, it is Meldy Cojuangco who got the bulk of the money from the sale of the family’s stake in Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.

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Dates to watch 2: For local basketball fans, December 15, a Sunday, bears watching. This is the deadline given by the Philippine Basketball Association to the winning NBN (Channel 4)/IBC (Channel 13) consortium to present a bank guarantee that it has the kind of money that won the bid for PBA’s television rights.

If the winning consortium doesn’t come up with that piece of paper from any bank in the Philippines, then the TV rights will go to the group with the second highest bid.

This group, which includes GMA (Channel 7) stockholder Menardo Jimenez and RFM president Jose Concepcion III, submitted the bank guarantee with its bid.