Security Bank CEO overtakes bigger boys, builds P425-M nest egg

His bank may only be the eighth biggest in the country, but Security Bank president Alberto Villarosa has already saved for a retirement portfolio whose size merits envy from colleagues in the bigger financial houses.

Villarosa, 62, president of Security since 2004, had amassed 3,100,455 of his bank shares as of end-August, a nest egg worth over P425 million as of Wednesday’s market close.

And that is not counting the 20-percent stock dividend that is forthcoming in the last quarter.

In contrast, Villarosa’s newly-retired counterpart in the Bank of the Philippine Islands, Aurelio Montinola III, had exactly 1,416,148 shares under his name as of mid-year, a pile worth over P101 million also as of Wednesday.

Over at the country’s biggest bank, BDO president Nestor Tan reported having already accumulated 2,578,186 BDO shares, worth about P195 million, since heading the bank of taipan Henry Sy in 1998.

Tan is only 55, so he could very well eclipse Villarosa’s record in seven years, especially given that the annual pay level of the BDO’s top management team, at an estimated P138 million this year, is more than twice that of Security Bank’s.

Incidentally this year’s highest-paid suit brigade are again from Union Bank, with chairman Justo Ortiz, president Victor Valdepeñas and three others projected to receive P227 million in aggregate compensation. That works out to an average of over P45 million each. Four years short of the magic 70, Valdepeñas has already squirreled over 3.5 million in Union Bank shares, which works out in the neighborhood of P430 million.

Going back to Security Bank, the remarkable rise in the bank’s fortunes in the last decade has already made chairman Frederick Dy, only 58, a billionaire 10 times over.

Just on his Security Bank holdings alone, Dy is already worth P10 billion. His younger sister Anastasia, with the rank of executive director, also rode with the rising tide, with her shareholdings growing to over P1.6 billion.

No wonder the recently-listed Asia United Bank was pitching itself to investors as the next Security Bank.

‘Ants’ attack spreads to Ecology The two-legged “ants” whom Toyota Philippines founder Ricardo Silverio Sr. had bewailed as gnawing at his and his late wife’s ownership of Forbes, Urdaneta and Bel-Air houses have spread to Ecology Village Dasmariñas.

The 84-year-old patriarch is battling with his children by his late first wife Beatriz Sison, all of them except restaurateur Nelia Silverio-Dee, also for the control of 26 Ecology townhouses, even though those Marcos-era built middle-class rowhouses are merely leased out, long-term, from the government.

And, judging from the recent court pleadings, it looks like it is the children, counselled by Philip Sigrid Fortun, who have gained the upper hand at the contested holding company, Pilipinas Development Corp., having already disposed of one townhouse despite the shareholder case pending at the Makati Regional Trial Court.

The sprawling San Rafael, Bulacan compound, where Tata Carding was the town’s long-time mayor and the district’s congressional representative, has so far remained untouched by the inheritance feud.

As well, a house in Daly City, California, the adobo town in the San Francisco Bay Area, has proved too far and too expensive to litigate for the siblings to fight over.

But just to be sure, Tata Carding had already transferred the title of the Daly house, in the same neighborhood of a nursing home and the Seton Medical Center, from another Silverio corporation to his own name.

Money talks

• Two tenured academics, Jose Jesus Roces and Ambassador Rosalinda Tirona, have won their labor battles against their respective school administrators, the Asian Institute of Management in the case of Roces and the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Pasig in the case of the retired diplomat.

• ABS-CBN Publishing has lost its decade-long trademark fight with the Philippine Daily Inquirer over the exclusive right to the title “Metro” even though the Lopez publishing outfit’s use has been limited to a high-society magazine while the Inquirer’s use has so far been limited to the newspaper’s city news section.

Heard through the grapevine

Perhaps by some lucky quirk in the Pacific jet stream, the daily Philippine Airlines flight from San Francisco will be spared from making an hour-long technical stop in Guam during the Yuletide season and the rest of the winter months, unlike the PAL flight from Los Angeles, which incidentally uses the same Boeing or Airbus long-haul plane for the transPacific route.

E-mail: cocktales_tv5@yahoo.com