Lucio Tan, the hope maker, sees no hope for country, blames politics

YOU SEE HOW THIS SUPER TAX CHEAT INTSIK IS? SUPER-HYPOCRIT, ISN’T HE? SUPER-INSULTO SA MGA PILIPINO PERO WALA NI ISANG NAGSALITANG PULITIKO TUNGKOL ITO. PURO TUMATANGGAP KAY BEHO LUCIO? LAHAT AY WALANG PUEDENG LEADER DAHIL LAHAT AY FOLLOWER NI MAGNANAKAW NA LUCIO?

Hope maker sees no hope for country, blames politics.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 28, 2002)
Byline: Clarissa Batino

NO GROWTH for the next 100 years. A foreign exchange rate of P120 to the dollar in the next four to six years. And no real national leader for at least the next three generations.
Billionaire tycoon Lucio Tan read his own version of the country’s fortune cookie on Monday night, and it foretold nothing but bad news.

“I think this country would continue to sleep in the next 100 years. We cannot grow because of politics, politics and politics. Our leader is not yet produced. Maybe in the next century, maybe three generations more,” said Tan in impromptu remarks delivered in halting English.
Tan, the man who rose from poverty to build a billion-dollar fortune selling tobacco, including Hope cigarettes, and liquor and eventually expanding to banking and airline services, is the last person one would expect to have given up hope in the country that gave him so many opportunities.

Yet disillusionment appears to have caught up with the Chinese-Filipino taipan, who advised an audience of bankers and reporters “not to be too optimistic” on the Philippines.
The taipan, whose disposition with the media had improved immensely in the last couple of months, even challenged anybody in the crowd to contact him “in heaven” by 2102, or a hundred years from now, to collect on the bet-in case, that is, his prophecies were wrong.
“For me, I don’t feel optimistic until we have discipline and we believe in ourselves,” Tan said.
But this is not the case with Filipinos who seem to have pursued wrong priorities, Tan added.
“In China, everybody has to learn English. In the Philippines, we reversed English. Education is popular but very low standard. No wonder the Philippine economy is bankrupt,” Tan said.

Simple ‘magbobote’

Tan started his tobacco business in 1966, a year after the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos was elected as president.
Born in China’s Fujian province, Tan migrated to the Philippines as a boy and worked his way through college. Former First Lady Imelda Marcos once referred to him as a simple “magbobote” before he met Ferdinand, who was then a congressman. Marcos changed the life and fortune of the struggling Chinese migrant.

When Marcos became president, Lucio’s tobacco business was accorded much-favored treatment. From tobacco, Tan expanded into liquor and brewery, bought Allied Bank, Philippine National Bank, Philippine Airlines, and engaged in diverse businesses in the Philippines, Hong Kong and China.

At Allied Bank’s “media thanksgiving” event at the Century Park Sheraton on Monday, Tan reminded the audience that when he projected that the peso would fall to P50 so many years ago, nobody believed him. “Look how much the peso is now. So I say it could go to P120 in the next two, four, or six years,” he added.

He said politics was making Filipinos poorer. That the population was growing at a faster rate than the economy did not help.

Tan also took the opportunity to take a swipe against the government’s tax policies.
“The taxpayer is skin and bones and yet we keep on milking. Talagang no more money but yet we keep on squeezing,” said the taipan whose flagship company Fortune Tobacco Corp. was accused by the Bureau of Internal Revenue during the Ramos administration of having evaded about P25 billion in taxes.

Unlike China that just keeps on developing, Tan said the Philippines was just deteriorating. “In China, every year there is change. In Manila, in 50 years there is no growth, just squatters growing,” he said.

According to Tan, the Philippines will continue to decay unless Filipinos believe that they could change and they could improve things.

“If time is infinity, nothing is impossible. How soon do we put a base in Seattle or in Denver, Colorado. Why not? The Americans keep on putting base in Subic, in Clark, in Zamboanga. Why not we put our base in America?” Tan asked.

He said the Japanese believed they could defeat the Americans and so bombed Pearl Harbor.
“We have to wake up. Or we would be like sleeping lions in the next 100 years,” Tan said