I didn’t need Mike Arroyo for loans—Ongpin

Roberto Ongpin

Businessman Roberto Ongpin on Thursday reiterated that former first gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo had no involvement in the controversial loans extended to him by the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP). Instead, he challenged Senator Sergio Osmeña III to look into the bank’s write-off of a large loan it had extended to the companies of the Lopez family.

In an e-mailed statement, the former trade minister said he was “1,000 percent sure, not only 110 percent, that Mike Arroyo had nothing to do with these loans.”

Osmeña the other day said he was “110 percent sure” of the former first gentleman’s involvement in the grant of the loans to Ongpin—which he described as behest loans—because of the speed by which they were approved.

Ongpin countered, however, that the P660-million total loan [P550 million and P110 million] used to acquire Philex Mining Corp. shares had been fully collateralized, was paid off early and resulted in a large profit for the bank.

“The fact of the matter is that DBP saw a good opportunity to make major profits and simply took that opportunity,” Ongpin said. “It was a judgment call on DBP’s part which proved to be totally correct and, in the process, earned for it a record profit of over P1.3 billion.”

“As I said before, I did not need the FG [Arroyo] to help me get these loans from DBP. The loans were fully collateralized and paid ahead of schedule.”

The businessman said Osmeña’s statement that he had witnesses against Ongpin, but whose identities he would keep secret for now, was probably prompted by the weakness of his accusation.

“No wonder Osmeña’s witnesses are afraid to go public,” Ongpin said. “They would be committing perjury if they did.”

Ongpin said it was “unfortunate” that Osmeña wanted “to make a career of investigating DBP loans and he uses every trick in the book to somehow connect me to them.”

“It is also strange to me why the good senator seems to be intent on targeting me from whom the DBP made a lot of money,” he added.

“Why doesn’t he investigate other DBP loans in which the bank lost a lot of money, such as the loans to the Lopez Group, in which the DBP is reported to have written off P1.67 billion.” Osmeña’s wife, Bettina Lopez Osmeña, belongs to one branch of the Lopez clan.