He’s back

Did you know 1: The Porsche currently being driven by a former officer of the Bases Conversion Development Authority is roughly valued at between P9.5 million and P11 million while the Lamborghini of a former officer of Clark Development Corp. is valued at between P9 million and P14 million.

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Did you know 2: Going into Saturday’s election, one candidate for chairman of the Philippine Stock Exchange has received so far a total of one proxy for 50,000 shares. As everybody knows, the candidates for chairman are, in alphabetical order now, Alicia Rita Morales Arroyo, Robert Coyiuto Jr., and Vivian Yuchengco.

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United Laboratories holds enough shares in Splash Corp. for one board seat. As everybody knows, Splash is majority owned by inventor, Rolando Hortaleza, who diversified from the manufacture manicure/pedicure products to personal care products, particularly skin-whitening soaps.

Starting April Fool’s Day, Unilab will have a new chairman, Joy Yao Campos. Carlos Ejercito remains the chief executive officer with an expanded portfolio that now includes overseeing the conglomerate’s international operations – the major reason why he is mostly out of the country these days – the personal training of Ms. Campos’ son, Clinton Hess, a Unilab vice-president as the next chairman.

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Bank notes 1: There’s talk that Lorenzo Tan might not be pre-sident and chief executive officer when the five-year rehabilitation of Philippine National Bank is completed about two-and-a-half years from now.

Here are two scenarios. One has government, which is one of two majority stakeholders of the bank (the other one is Lucio Tan), replacing current chairman Francisco Dizon with Yayie Tan. The other scenario has the bank’s CEO pre-terminating his management contract and a European financial institution as a senior member of its Asian team and as concurrent head of its Philippine operation.

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Bank notes 2: Everybody in Insular Savings Bank from president and chief executive officer Susan Figueras down will be undergoing a job interview by Citibank NA officers led by global consumer group country business manager Niña Aguas once money changes hands by end-May, 2005.

Since Citi currently has only six local commercial bank branches supervised by vice-president for branch operations Aileen Litonjua, the chances are high that almost everybody in the 36-branch savings bank will get to keep their jobs.

And if HSBC’s local experience is used as a model, the compensation package of the savings bank to be renamed Citibank Savings will eventually be the same as the mother bank.

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After a close-to-two-year IT hiatus, former Oracle Phils. country head Bernard Yu is back in the game – this time, as vice-chairman and chief executive officer of local software company, Information Managers, Inc.

Informan is one of two local distributors of QAD solutions. (The other one is an Ayala subsidiary).

Basically, California-based QAD offers the same solutions as the big boys with brand recalls but, of course, at a more affordable price and with better training and after-sales service.

Mr. Yu, who not only help build the Oracle business in the country but also gave the company a more humane face through corporate responsibility projects, is focusing on three segments in the manufacturing industry, one of which is food and beverage.

Informan’s marketing strategy is to not to target the country’s top 500 companies but to target the next 500 and below. And, hey, if the top 500 would like to do business with Infoman, so much the better.