so what does manny v. pangilinan of the telecom giant pldt have to do with zte-fg?
twice his name has come up.
once in the senate, when nene pimentel asked the two deans (one current, one former) of the u.p. school of economics something like, who did you write the paper for, that paper socritical of government’s national broadband network project. abah. it was commissioned by manny pangilinan of pldt no less for a very cool million bucks.
the second time in a very long text message from a “palace loyalist” that manolo quezon posted in his blog, to the effect that the zte deal involves a manila counterpart, and zte chose multimedia telephony (once owned by joey de venecia, now by bigbusinessman ricky razon na super-close sa arroyos and owns manila standard today), and that it was not only joey who was jockeying to become the manila counterpart, si manny pangilinan din daw
tried 2get a share of d biz but Razon wont let him. N return, PLDT paid d UP prof P1M 2 make d study dat wil put d NBN-ZTE look bad. PLDT s fundingall d bad PR on Razon & giving d oppositionsenators d bullets 2 kill d NBNZTE. NBN-ZTE s nothing but a fight of greedy pipol but could cause enormous economic loss 4 d country.
hmm, di ba. too much. how greedy talaga. talk about corporate social responsibility. nasaan na ang spirit of giving back to society? kung getting to that last mile ang problema, malinaw naman kung saan kailangan ang tulong, ang charity, ng pldt at globe, di ba? given their billions in profits last year (47!), they should be giving back, paying back, the right way, the right place, to the right people. instead we read in the inquirer about filipino firms investing $1.8 billion dollars abroad from january to june this year! and we read in the manila times that only 160 families own the economy and the politics of this country! where’s the justice?
but i don’t agree with the texter na cancelling zte would cause enormous economic loss for the country. i hope s/he’s just talking about the many other big projects that were in the bag na sana. because, sa totoo lang, nakaka-tense yang super-close relations ni gma with china. what’s she up to ba talaga? playing the china card and selling us out bigtime? is that really the way to go? can’t we be more creative than that?
i checked on the supposed revelation enrile got out of the up profs, and it seems what they really said was, they’d participated in a forum sponsored by pldt. but they are emphatic that they were never paid by pldt or anyone else, to produce their paper on zte.
really? i was monitoring the hearings. i may be wrong about pimentel, and then, again, maybe not, but i’m sure i heard one of the deans say “one million”. i remember being impressed by such a huge figure, racket pala.