Tan siblings assume key MacroAsia posts

MANILA, Philippines — Lucio “Bong” Tan Jr., the son and namesake of the taipan,  is taking a more active role in his father’s MacroAsia Corp. as he has been elected as treasurer, while his sister Vivienne Tan has been named as director.

Bong has been a director of MacroAsia since 1997.  He replaces former Philippine Airlines president Jaime Bautista who retired as treasurer of MacroAsia  last month.

Except for Bautista, the rest of the company’s top executives had been re-elected with Lucio Tan as chairman and chief executive officer, his son-in-law Joseph Chua as president and chief operating officer, Marivic Moya as senior vice president for legal, human resources and external relations, Amador Sendin as chief financial officer and  Florentino Herrera as corporate secretary.

The composition of the board of directors, meanwhile, is largely the same except for newcomers Rex Vincent Young and Tan’s daughter Vivienne.

Completing the board are Carmen Tan, Michael Tan, Rex Vincent Young as directors and  Johnip Cua, Ben Tiu, Marixi Prieto and Samuel Uy as independent directors.

The new board also eased the qualifications of directors by reducing the number of qualifying shares of directors to just 1,000 shares from 100,000 shares.

“This will widen the field of possible qualified directors for MacroAsia as the lower number of shares to be held will not be a major constraint for many shareholders. Also, the lesser number of shares required for the 11 MacroAsia directors to hold and qualify as directors will make more shares available for the market rather than if 100,000 shares be locked up for each director during their tenure of service,” the company said in a disclosure.

The company is Tan’s aviation support business.

MacroAsia expects 2019 to be a banner year after taking over PAL’s billion peso worth of ground-handling and airline catering contracts from Cebuano tycoon Manny Osmena’s Sky Logistics and Sky Kitchen.

The company expects profits to rise by more than 20 percent this year with the addition of the new groundhandling and airline catering contracts from PAL.

MacroAsia recorded a three percent increase in its profit to P1.05 billion last year.  Elevated costs dampened the sustained revenue growth of the company’s in-flight catering units.