Comeuppance

Karma, as they say, has a long memory. And it has gone digital.

A certain Mindanao businessman who once seemed destined for the business stratosphere might want to remember that — especially since someone once tried to help him get there.

That someone lent his considerable expertise, effort, and connections, pro bono, helping burnish the young businessman’s public image and establish his stature as an emerging force in the corporate world.

It was apparently done in the spirit of friendship and goodwill.

Then came the rather less charitable chapter. The businessman apparently thought the Good Samaritan’s other business was a charity, and he racked up millions of pesos in unpaid advertising bills.

Nosy Tarsee would hate to suggest that the universe keeps score. But if it does, it appears to have an accountant with a wicked sense of timing. Because the once-rising trader now finds himself presiding over an empire that badly needs rescuing.

Word is his holding company is about to “rescue” its own listed casino-and-resort arm by taking over the whole operating subsidiary — liabilities, foreclosed hotel and all — dressed up as a “streamlined, strengthened” corporate makeover.

The subsidiary sits on nearly P8 billion of negative book value, its last income-producing property having just been auctioned off to a state bank after nobody else bothered to bid.

And the “rescue” is being financed not with fresh cash but by simply erasing what the listed company owes the parent.

A market habitue explained to Nosy Tarsee that canceling a debt you were never actually collecting does not exactly qualify as financial strengthening.

Minority shareholders in the listed shell, meanwhile, are being asked to trust that whatever’s left after the liabilities are brushed off will be “fair, reasonable and advantageous.”

Fair to whom, exactly? That’s a question Nosy Tarsee would be eager to ask in a stockholders’ meeting.

And here’s another irony: the parent company doing the “rescuing” isn’t exactly flush either, between a fuel unit sweating its own numbers and a telco venture still finding its footing. Its promise of “continued financial support, if possible” sounds less like a guarantee than a carefully worded escape hatch.

Perhaps that’s the thing about karma. It doesn’t always arrive with thunderbolts. Sometimes it arrives quietly, bearing a balance sheet.

Nosy Tarsee is now asking the erstwhile businessman: When an empire that once bet big on casinos, container ships, and telco starts quietly shuffling its bad bets into the shadows of a private balance sheet, who is it really trying to keep afloat?