The chink in Willy Parayno’s fence

Did you know 1: It turns out the Philippines makes some of the best-tasting brandy and rum in the world. Ask your European friends who know their liquor.

It doesn’t hurt that the price is right, too.

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Did you know 2: The three most popular ice cream flavors anywhere in the world are – in no particular order – chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla.

In the Philippines, ube or purple yam is one of the top three. Guess which one ube dislodged?

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By the end of this year, Shoppesville and Virra Mall in the Greenhills Commercial Center will revert to Ortigas & Co. Ltd. Partnership. Actually, the lease contract ended three years ago but OCLP president and chief executive officer Rafael Ortigas Jr. rolled these over until this year.

This is an opportunity for Rafa Ortigas’s main man, chief operating officer Rex Drilon II and his team led by Greenhills general manager Joselito Santos, to redevelop (read: get rid of some, uh, unwanted tenants like those selling triple X VDC/DVD films and bring in new business concepts) the two buildings.

Virra Mall is, of course, well known to techies while Shoppesville is viajera paradise and an incubator of many RTW business. Fact is, some brands which started in Shoppesville such as Bayo have returned into the newly opened 2,000-square meter upscale section called, "The Shops", which used to be the unprofitable dry goods section of Peter Ng’s Unimart.

Greenhills is estimated to have a daily pedestrian traffic count of 100,000 during weekdays and up to 130,000 during weekends. The average consumption per person is about P1,500 (which purchases from tiangge stuff to mobile phones).

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Revenue Commissioner Guillermo Parayno is, indeed, a very cautious man.

Why, he has assigned men to watch each production line in all factories producing cigarettes. That means that if a cigarette factory has three production lines, then Willy Parayno has three men whose only job is to count how many packs of cigarettes are being produced.

Mr. Parayno also has another man assigned to the warehouse of each factory. This man’s assignment is to make sure that all stocks withdrawn from the warehouse carry the BIR stamp that the appropriate tax has been paid.

Now here’s where money can be made. You see, exported cigarettes, which are tax exempt, occasionally do find their way back to the Philippine market.

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Rafael Alunan III just wants everybody to know that he was at the Maynilad Water Services, Inc. head office until Friday, his last working day, and that he reported for work the next Monday – no, he didn’t take a vacation to make that print ad for a Swiss watch – in his new posting at the Philippine Infrastructure Development Corp., the mother company of Manila North Tollways Corp.