Pecuniary decency

By JUAN L. MERCADO
July 14, 2013

Ferdinand Marcos’ coconut levy robbed impoverished farmers blind long after the dictatorship collapsed in 1986. The Supreme Court, last week, shredded crony Eduardo Cojuangco’s claim for sequestered 700 million San Miguel Corporation shares. Should we cheer?

President Benigno Aquino froze tapping into the SMC kitty, until the high court handed a final decision. That came Tuesday.

In a unanimous resolution, the Court declared Cojuangco shares in United Coconut Planters Bank as government-owned. It affirmed the July 2003 Sandiganbayan decision that his UCPB shares were swiped coco levies. The SC upheld shredded “with finality” a May 1975 Philippine Coconut Administration decision: “Compensate” Cojuangco with 10 percent from the 72 percent First United Bank (now UCPB) stocks.

“Farmers hail court ruling in UCPB case,” an Inquirer banner read. Government will sell P14.4 billion worth of the stocks, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. president Valentin Araneta said. That’d go into a trust fund for coconut farmers.

Under martial law, Marcos signed Presidential Decree 276. It directed that “coco levies” be clamped in 68 provinces. These would be owned by cronies “in their private capacities.” Taxes became individual loot.

If PD 276 is not scrubbed as unconstitutional, “Marcos found a legal and valid way to steal,” wrote then columnist Antonio Carpio. As Supreme Court justice today, Carpio finds himself vindicated.

Cojuangco was martial law coconut czar, until People Power drove him into Haiwaiian exile with the dictator. In between, levies bankrolled a hydra of coco mills, a bank, even a producers’ federation that never mustered names of supposed one million members.

Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, in August 1998, presented to President Joseph Estrada a Catholic Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference memo. “Abuse of state power” wrung those monies from impoverished coconut farmers, it said. They should be returned.

But just before People Power II, Erap signed Executive Orders 313 and 315. These delivered the levy – estimated at over P100 billion then – to cronies,” “It was grand larceny that needed ever-larger doses of hypocrisy. Today, Manila Mayor Estrada pledges honest government.

Led by Chief Justice Hilario Davide, the Supreme Court ruled the levy were public funds. A furious Cojuangco unleashed, in November 2003, a “Brat Pack” of Nationalist People's Coalition congressmen to impeach Davide.

”Is this a coalition of cretins?” snapped Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. “The conundrum of the House is: how to climb, out of the shit hole in which a third of its members descended with such stealth…” The House spurned Cojuangco’s “hitmen”.

On the coco levy, the Corona Supreme Court flip-flopped four times. It somersaulted also four times on the bill that turned 16 unqualified towns into cities. Flight attendants, won final judgement on their case, were stunned to learn it had been reversed – by a “final judgment”.

The Corona Court issued March 2011, an “entry of judgment”: Cojuangco’s P56.3-billion SMC shares are now “final.” SMC stock certificates in blank, found in a Malacañang vault when the Marcoses scrammed for Hawaii, “legally” belong to Cojuangco.

“The joke of the century,” snapped then Justice Conchita Carpio Morales. Cojuangco “used for his personal benefit the very same funds entrusted to him,” Morales’ dissenting opinion states. “[These] were released to him through illegal and improper machination of loan transactions. [His] contravention of corporation laws … indicates a clear violation of fiduciary duty…”

Before Tuesday’s decision, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad suggested in an Inquirer interview: Go through the fine print of proposed conversion of SMC shares. It had a curiously “stitched-in qualification”: Should the government sell its shares, San Miguel Corp. “shall have (a) exclusive option to buy said shares and (b) at P75 per share.”

Wait! Isn’t that a Court-sanctioned fire sale for a cozy monopoly? A share commanded P114 at the stock exchange at that time, Coconut Industry Investment Fund chair Wigberto Tañada said. In a free market, government would probably earn P87 billion for the small farmers. But this booby-trapped provision would shackle the government into settling for only P57 billion.

Who’d pocket the P30 billion “diff” this time around?. Farmers would be suckered again – That “joke of the century 2.” But, Tuesday’s decision scrubs that rewind.

This greed plays out in a country where the richest 10 per cent, in mansions, with four-wheel drives and bodyguards, consume 31 centavos out of every peso. In contrast, the poorest 10 per cent, huddled in slums, make do with three centavos. When a crisis hits, the poor pare that down to two centavos. The rich rearrange their menus.

“Here, net worth equals self-worth,” a banker explained. Bank balances and car models set the pecking order. You cornered the coconut levy? You get first places at table, plus a Supreme Court justice or two as bonus.

Some call that “pecuniary decency”. And poverty becomes the original sin. Transporting gold to the grave is the end-all and be-all. Official position evolves into a tool for conserving perks of the elite.