Masipag, matiyaga

After going through all the documents below, I am now of the strong opinion that yes, I think Villar is merely exploiting the poor in his advertisements. Indeed, if you think about it, he is so proud of being a child of Tondo but what has he exactly done for Tondo? None, if you base it on the Priority Development Assistance Fund he released from 2003 to 2006. Meanwhile, Las Pinas gets a huge chunk of money from the Senator as you can see in one of the links below.

I read the following via Manolo Quezon's Twitter account, from which he posted the following links: (Disclosure: he is voting for Noynoy. So am I.)

A Case of Plunder

Senate Committee report seeking Villar's censure

Fact Sheet on Villar C-5 controversy

P60 million: What Noynoy Aquino spent in disbursements in three years, Villar spent in one. (Note that more than half of which, or P35.5 million, went to Las Pinas, where his wife is Congresswoman.)

Book on finance cites Villar for graft & corruption:
One example was C&P Homes (C&P), a Philippine corporate property developer of low-end housing. The company owned a substantial amount of land around Manila and had issued dollar-denominated debt to finance its land purchases and to develop the land. However, when the Asia crisis occurred, land values collapsed and the company ran out of cash. The company suggested a restructuring under which creditors would have taken a large haircut. Creditors explored legal avenues to foreclose on C&P’s holdings. However, despite spending substantial time and legal fees on these efforts, creditors were unable to gain control of company property or force liquidation because of the lack of reliable bankruptcy laws in the Philippines. C&P’s controlling shareholder was Senator Manuel Villar who was able to use his position to further stymie creditor efforts to force a restructuring or foreclose on C&P properties. It was an example of the downside of investing in corporations in countries without reliable bankruptcy laws. Creditors were powerless to enforce their rights and were left with nearly valueless securities.

Rohan Douglas, Credit Derivative Strategies: New Thinking on Managing Risk and Return, ( Villar’s cited on page 30)

About the Author: Rohan Douglas, editor of this volume, is the founder and CEO of Quantifi Inc., a leading provider of pricing models and risk analysis tools for structured credit. He has more than twenty-five years of experience in the global financial industry. Prior to founding Quantifi, he was the director of global credit research at Citigroup and Salomon Smith Barney where he worked for ten years. Douglas has worked in interest-rate derivatives, emerging markets, and global fixed income. He is also an adjunct professor in the graduate financial engineering program at Polytechnic University in New York and at the Macquarie University Applied Finance Centre in Australia and Singapore.

I think we've suffered enough during Arroyo's administration. Installing Villar as the head of this state would merely be a continuation of her legacy in economics and profiteering.