Two down

OF the six men who have served as governor of the Central Bank/Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas since the 1980s, two have since passed away—Jose Fernandez  Jr. in 1994 and Rafael Buenaventura last Thursday.
           
The watch of Jobo Fernandez and Paeng Buenaventura were both critical to the country’s financial survival. Fernandez was the transition CB governor between Presidents Marcos and Aquino. Buenaventura was appointed BSP governor a year after President Estrada garnered the most number of votes in the country’s electoral history.
           
Fernandez was a reluctant governor, the only choice of both local and foreign bankers to stave off a financial meltdown. And yet, despite such stature, Fernandez had to cool his heels for hours on end outside the offices of multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and of New York-based banks as he tried to negotiate for better repaying terms for the country’s foreign debts. He never talked about the shame but the people who accompanied him were less proud.
           
During such discouraging moments, Fernandez would pull out his wallet and look at a one-million-denominated bill of Argentina’s currency. He told reporters: “I promised myself the Philippines would never go the way of Argentina,” where, at that time, wives would daily wait outside their husbands’ offices and, once paid, would then rush to grocery stores or supermarkets before the prices of consumer products could be repriced.
           
Fernandez was still founder and chief executive officer of Far East Bank & Trust Co., when the country called for a debt moratorium in 1983. At the time, the Finance Secretary was Cesar Virata (now Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. corporate chairman) and Buenaventura was the country officer of Citibank NA.
           
Buenaventura once recalled that he tried to walk the thin line between what was expected of him as the representative of the country’s biggest foreign creditor and what was expected of him as a Filipino. He did a credible job for both sides.
           
1989 was a crossroad for him. When Eugenio Lopez Jr. and John Gokongwei Jr. offered him the presidency of the just privatized PCIBank, Citi’s top man John Reed offered to move him from Italy to New York and gave him a clear shot at senior management in the world’s biggest financial group.
           
“It was payback time for me. I wanted to work for a Philippine company and I wanted to see how far I could take it,” he said a week after returning to Manila.
           
By the end of his 10th year as president, PCIBank and FEBTC competed to be the country’s third-largest bank. Since then, PCIBank had transferred majority ownership twice and FEBTC had been absorbed by Bank of the Philippine Islands.
           
Unlike Fernandez, Buenaventura was not shy about accepting the governorship. His last year in PCIBank was a humiliating one, with Gokongwei bringing in another Citibanker, Ed Sy, to run the show as president-in-waiting. But Buenaventura didn’t see it that way.