Ed ‘The Pretender’ Marcos lived high on the hog in Hong Kong - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

HONG KONG – The 180,000 Filipinos who live and work here were out on the streets and in the malls yesterday – their traditional Sunday weekend – wondering how things are going back home.

That’s how many Pinays (mostly domestic helpers, plus hotel staff workers) and Pinoys remain employed here, despite the increasing pressure by immigration officers on families and business establishments to hire Chinese instead. (There are, in addition, 6,000 Filipino musicians and entertainment industry workers in this city, classified as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) by the People’s Republic of China.)

The truth is that, for all the hustle and bustle and the impressive infrastructure (left behind by the departed British colonial masters), business is bad. The real estate market is terribly depressed. Several offices have relocated "inside" to China, such as to Huangzhou (Canton) and next-door Shenzhen, the special economic zone just a short train hop across the "border", because rentals are much cheaper, and the wages paid local staff are three or four times less.

The designer name-brand shops and emporia, once so upmarket and sassy when Japanese, American and European tourists used to flood into Hong Kong, are in the doldrums. Even local Hongkongers don’t shop in their own malls as assiduously as in the salad days when incomes were higher and business was booming. Today, they prefer to skip across the frontier to nearby Shenzhen, where they spent no less than Hong Kong $6.6 billion last year on cheap handbags, clothes, shoes, cigarettes, tea, playing golf, dental treatment, food and accommodations. In short, in China where the most cunning fakes are manufactured, why buy the "real thing" at many times the cost of the counterfeit?

The HK Census and Statistics Department calculated that in cross-border spending sprees, Hong Kong residents spent an average of HK$420 per trip. Multiplying this by than 16 million such trips, they arrived at the HK$6.6 billion figure.

This, the bureau said mournfully, is only part of the picture. Hong Kong folk spent about HK$29.4 billion in 3.8 million trips to the mainland. This was based on the estimated five trips each person makes a year to mainland China.

The Hong Kong government and entrepreneurs are pinning their hopes of attracting renewed tourism and business on the anticipated arrival of Mickey Mouse. I’m referring to the multibillion-dollar Disneyland project, now a-building, which is expected to come into operation in the year 2005. Will Donald Duck and the Disney Gang coming to the rescue on the planned site on Lantau island (near the airport) revitalize Hong Kong? Hope springs eternal, of course. But if the bulk of the tourists come, as they do now from mainland China, they won’t be able to count on an influx of big-spenders.

The Filipinos used to be the big-spenders of decades ago. However, that’s only a memory nowadays.

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One big-spender from the Philippines, true enough, was the object of fascination and astonishment here in Hong Kong not long ago. This was the fellow who styled himself "Edilberto Marcos Marcos", claiming to be an illegitimate son of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos, but later unmasked to be bearing two other aliases, that of Edilberto M. del Carmen, and Alberto M. Puzon – the latter, perhaps, his real monicker.

Edilberto Marcos blew into town last year, flashing a fortune of a reputed $500 million. He recruited the best and the brightest he could find to compose his "new" investment company, which he dubbed "Metro Grant Holdings Ltd." Among the criteria this wheeler-dealer imposed for the choice of staff was that all the men and women recruited, mostly young, should be good-looking and "Church-going." Then he threw a big bash at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Wanchai to kick off his company, which cost a reputed HK $1.6 million. For instance, receptionists for the gala affair were contracted from a modeling agency (their three fairest, and longest-legged) at a cost of HK$2,000 per girl that night. VIPs were brought over from Manila to grace the occasion, including relatives of then President Estrada, as well as bigwigs of the caliber of Ed Zialcita, and, among his guests of honor, Rizal Governor and Erap pal, Ito Ynares, and a prominent general, too. Of course, it was also well-advertised that one of his board members and directors was former Chairman David Castro of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG).

Ed Marcos himself was attired in a pure white suit at the occasion, as if to symbolize the purity of his . . . uh, intentions.

For ten months he was a man-about-town here, with him and his staff riding around in stretch Mercedes Benzes, Mercedes Benz 600s, a swanky Lamborghini, etc. He maintained a staff of seven chauffeurs for round-the-clock service. He entertained a steady stream of visitors from abroad, namedropping shamelessly at every opportunity.

Edilberto, too (in the tradition, perhaps, of his claimed sire) was a playboy supreme. He met and wooed, and won a movie actress named Angelu and not only brought her over several times a month for non-stop shopping expeditions ($160 million on one such spree), but gifted her with a mansion in Dasmariñas and a blue Mercedes Benz. She also sent her, her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, on a high-profile trip to the US. Whether it’s true that she had an abortion recently, or not, is beside the point.

She wasn’t the only "love" in his life. He dated other girls (besides being married) as well. One of the most visible ladies in his stable was a beautiful, voluptuous Russian girl whom he loved to squire around in his Lamborghini.

He maintained as well an army of aides and security men with cellphones and walkie-talkies to keep track of each of his lady loves, as a result of which he managed to escort each woman in turn without bumping into any of the others, thereby preventing an eye-gouging, hair-pulling match.

Once, when a diffident assistant manager of the Grand Hyatt approached him, politely requesting him to update the payments he owed the hotel, he literally dragged the fellow into his room, threw a bunch of gold Rolexes at him, and flung open a chest which appeared to be stacked with US dollars, while he furiously screeched: "Here! Here! You think I can’t pay? Get what you want, you idiot! I’m getting out of here and bringing my business elsewhere." The trembling fellow, overwhelmed and mollified, apologized profusely and backed out of the room. In the end, naturally, it became clear that Edilberto M. Marcos was bluffing all the way.

A group of 24 of his top employees and personnel, in fact, walked out on him last December and sued him for millions of dollars in unpaid salaries, allowances, and overtime. He’s been exposed in HK, at least, as a bluffer and welsher.

Then there’s the "arrest" of this guy Marcos and his associate, ex-PCGG Chairman Castro, in a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in New York. Here in Hong Kong, Interpol is cracking down on Marcos on several scams, while the potent ICAC (Independent Citizens Anti-Corruption Commission) is investigating Marcos and Metro Grant Holdings.

Abangan the next chapter of this fantastic saga.

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Another PCGG caper, but this time the still operating PCGG of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration, is a move by that government agency to kick out five directors of the San Miguel Corporation who were appointed by the defunct Erap regime, and replace them with five directors handpicked by the new GMA administration.

What’s this? Are PCGG writs of sequestration issued 15 years ago, in 1986, open-ended? Are the corporate boards of sequestered firms to be changed with each shift of political mood, like a game of musical chairs?

When thousands of San Miguel Corporation stockholders convene for their annual stockholders’ meeting this Thursday, May 3 (I mistakenly said July in a previous column), that’s when the PCGG will try to shoehorn its "chosen" ones into the board. The ultimate aim, though, is to oust former Ambassador and Governor Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco from leadership of SMC. But why?

Major portfolio managers and representatives of big investment houses based here in Hong Kong are watchfully waiting to see what happens, so they can gauge whether the new GMA government can guarantee them "a level playing field" or whether the cronyism of the Estrada administration has been resurrected (with new and different cronies) in the Arroyo administration. The way the government "meddles" or keeps its cotton-pickin’ hands off the coming SMC stockholders’ meet will send them the message.

The fact is that under the chairmanship of Cojuangco the SMC has progressed and prospered more than ever before. The corporation ended the year 2000 with a recurring net income of P7.5 billion, or 25 percent over the previous year’s P6.01 billion.

Operating income amounted to P7.9 billion, or 19 percent higher than last year’s P6.7 billion, as cost management and efficiency-enhancing measures offset the hikes in production costs brought about by rising raw material prices, escalating fuel costs, and the depreciation of the peso.

SMC’s consolidated net sales were up 17 percent from last year’s, attaining P88.7 billion. Growth in beverages (like beer) was up 14 percent, in packaging 16 percent, and in food, 12 percent.

Under previous management, beer sales were in deficit overseas. Last year, SMC’s international beer operations (excluding J. Boag and Son) turned around into profitability in the last quarter of 1999. The operating income of US$3.8 million completely reversed the previous year’s operating loss of US$6.3 million. San Miguel acquired last year the Australian brewer J. Boag and Son, and this contributed significantly to SMC’s overall gains, with its own impressive growth of 21 percent, registered since the acquisition. La Tondeña, for its part, saw its revenues up 23 percent at P2.9 billion, and net income up 34 percent to P1.35 billion.

According to projections, the reacquisition of Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines, Inc. (from the Australian Coca-Cola Amatil) will, if projections are on the nose, boost the revenues of the SMC group to P125.18 billion in 2001, up from only P88.7 billion last year, and increase net profits to P8.23 billion.

Let me say it again, then: "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." That’s an old American saying and caveat which has been proven true, time and again. The government must help San Miguel, one of the few brightly performing conglomerates in these discouraging times, not discombobulate it and send it into disarray.