SEC Watch: Without Fear or Favor
Twenty-six years is a long time to hold the line. The Tribune has held it, imperfectly and under pressure, as all institutions do.
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Twenty-six years is a long time to hold the line. The Tribune has held it, imperfectly and under pressure, as all institutions do.
Twenty-six years ago, a group of journalists founded a newspaper based on a simple but radical proposition: the press should operate without fear or favor. No bending to power. No softening of inconvenient truths. No trading of editorial integrity for access or advertising.
The Daily Tribune was born from that conviction and it has carried it through raids, libel suits, and the daily pressures that silence lesser publications.
It is worth pausing on an anniversary like this to ask what that conviction demands in practice.
And it is worth noting, from this column’s corner of the page, that the Securities and Exchange Commission is asking itself the same question.
Regulation, like journalism, is only meaningful if it is applied without fear or favor. A regulator that enforces the rules selectively, that pursues small violators while looking away from powerful ones, that treats enforcement as a negotiating tool rather than a public duty, is not a regulator at all. It is a gatekeeper for the interests it was meant to check.
The SEC’s mandate, like the Tribune’s founding mission, stands or falls on whether it can be trusted to apply the same standard to everyone.
The past year has tested that standard in concrete ways. The SEC has pursued criminal complaints against investment fraudsters regardless of their corporate pedigree. It has sought and obtained an Interpol red notice against a fugitive CEO whose scheme left ordinary Filipinos with worthless promises and empty accounts. It has consulted publicly on regulatory reform, revised draft circulars based on stakeholder feedback and published its reasoning.
These are not gestures. They are the daily practice of a regulator that understands accountability as a lived commitment rather than a stated value.
A newspaper’s anniversary is worth marking only if the writing earns it. That is a harder standard than it sounds. Anniversaries invite celebration. What they rarely invite is the honest question of whether the institution has remained true to the values that justified its founding. The SEC can ask the same question of itself.
Capital markets regulation in the Philippines has made genuine progress. Enforcement is sharper, disclosure requirements are stronger, and the Commission’s willingness to pursue cases across borders signals a seriousness that was not always self-evident.
But progress is not permanence. The pressure to accommodate the powerful, to delay the inconvenient, to prefer form over substance, is permanent. Resisting it requires the same thing it always has: institutional courage and the refusal to make exceptions for the well-connected.
That is where the SEC and the Tribune share more than a column. Both exist to protect people who cannot protect themselves from those who hold more power, more money, or more information than they do.
The investor who trusted a Ponzi scheme and lost everything. The reader who needed an accurate account of what their government was doing. These are not abstract beneficiaries. They are the reason the institutions exist.
Twenty-six years is a long time to hold the line. The Tribune has held it, imperfectly and under pressure, as all institutions do. The SEC must hold its own line with the same stubbornness and the same clarity of purpose.
Without fear or favor. The words are easy. The practice is everything.
