All’s well that ends well: DU30 to grace A350, Lucio Tan affair
It looks like President Duterte is ready to fly the friendly skies with Lucio Tan.
Not only has he kept his word to no longer publicly tongue-lash the taipan, but Du30 has even agreed to grace the official rollout tomorrow of Philippine Airlines’ first A350 plane.
According to an official invitation from PAL, the event will also be a double-celebration for the flag carrier since the Kapitan is marking his 83rd birthday on the same day. Duterte’s change of attitude towards the PAL chairman came after Tan decided to no longer contest the P6 billion in accumulated landing fees that the government had insisted on collecting since the Marcos years when PAL was still a state-owned airline.
Besides settling the demanded P6 billion in cash, Tan also volunteered to repatriate at no cost to the government thousands of overseas workers from Kuwait during the height of the diplomatic row with the Kuwaiti government.
That patriotic gesture from PAL apparently did not go unnoticed by Maĺacañang, a series of humanitarian missions enough to justify a Duterte pivot and reward the former presidential pet peeve with an official visit to Tan’s corporate kingdom.
As to the A350, it was good that the taipan discarded a proposal for him to join the turnover ceremonies at the Airbus factory and the ferry crew from France.
The stress of the long-distance travel caused even Tan’s special and much younger assistant, Emilio Yu, to arrive in Toulouse in a wheelchair, and restrict him to the hotel room to rest for three days until the return leg Saturday.
Yu thankfully arrived in better shape in Manila than when he did in Toulouse, a testament to the A350’s vaunted cabin quietness and comforts.
An indication of PAL’s positive assessment that it would be getting a bigger slice of the lucrative business class segment when it fields the A350 for both the New York and London routes is that it has allocatted more business class seats, 30, than the 24 it had allotted for premium economy.
PAL president Jaime Bautista is waiting for Airbus to deliver three more A350s before the flag carrier starts fielding them in late October for the four-times-a-week New York and the daily London service.
Two more of the estimated $315-million flying hotel would be delivered by next year, enough for PAL to start a new nonstop service, perhaps to Paris or to Seattle, depending on the results of the numbers-crunching from his SVP for corporate planning, Angelito Alvarez.
Money talks
• Metrobank director Alfred Ty last week acquired five million Metrobank shares at P89.80 each, in what appeared to be the latest shuffling of corporate cards as the acquisition was part of the “intragroup transactions among the Ty family companies.”
By Ty’s own accounting, his share of the Metrobank pie was worth over P4.42 billion even in today’s bear market.
• The shuttered Hard Rock Cafe in Makati’s Glorietta dodged off a P27.8-million tax case after the former singernow-Court of Tax Appeals Associate Justice Esperanza Fabon-Victorino ruled that Hard Rock was neither a cabaret nor a day/night club where dancing is the primary attraction, the presence of which would have justified the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s move to levy the 18 percent amusement tax.
Fellow Associate Justices Lovell Bautista and Ma. Belen Ringpis-Liban concurred.
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com