Let us begin with a story. A foreigner (American in this case) by the name of Mike, starts an online negotiation with a Filipino (a Filipino-chinese in this case) named Gus, sometime around the year 2003. The Filipino-chinese (tsinoy) named Gus, with 3 other Filipinos, start working on a contractual/per diem basis for the foreigner Mike over the internet, and in a few weeks their business is flourishing. The foreigner comes down to the Philippines around 2004 and personally meets the tsinoy. They negotiate how to increase their output and how to enter into a symbiotic business relationship. The foreigner is deeply impressed by the tsinoys humbleness and straight-forwardness. He also meets a few women he met “on line” and decides on one named “marisyl” as being the best choice and enters into a personal relationship with her. A few months pass and there is bliss in their lives. Marisyl then becomes head of the foreigner’s business office in 2005, and the Filipinos have a clash of personalities, for a middle class Filipino, especially a tsinoy, would easily take orders from a foreigner but from a Filipina….. Well, they won’t. Thus a fight ensues between the foreigner and Marisyl, unbeknownst to both that it is this tsinoy Gus who is fanning flames on both sides. The foreigner sides with his tsinoy worker over his girl friend, and a new business office is born. The tsinoy has gained the foreigners total trust by this time. He is given free hand to hire and fire people in the new business office, and to run the day to day affairs of the business in a way that has the least resistance from the foreigner. The tsinoy can make decisions without conferring with the foreigner first. The foreigner trusts this tsinoy so much that eventually when he gets married to a local girl in 2006, named Marissa, his best man is said tsinoy. He even makes this tsinoy Godfather to his only child, a son named Horace, at his Roman Catholic baptismal in 2009. The foreigner gives lavish salaries and bonuses to this tsinoy and his group of chosen people from 2005 to 2011. The tsinoy runs the foreigners business as if it were his own. He and his wife Riza sometimes publicly call said business their own, and because the foreigner never reacts due to his total faith in said tsinoy, people believe their claim. In 2009, the foreigner expands by opening another office in a city 7hrs away by land from the first in a city called Davao. Mike spends money on furnishing and computer equipments and sets up office and a staffhouse in Davao. He puts Gus and his cohorts in full control there too. Soon business is booming. The tsinoy, seeing the viability of both offices, suddenly gets an ambitious idea to start a company to compete with the foreigners company. Thus for more than a year, he, his wife, and his chosen people, in tandem, embezzle as much as they can from the company accounts and finances, billing even personal accounts such as credit cards, personal cellular phone bills, internet bills, restaurant bills and such to the foreigners company expense and bank accounts, all in the guise of corporate expenses. They also start opening bank accounts in the foreigner’s company name, but in which they are the signatories and not the foreigner. To accommodate this they make themselves Board of Directors of the business corporation and convince the foreigner that his name will not be included in the board to save him from any legal duress arising from legal claims and employee suits. All along the foreigner tags along like an unsuspecting child in a Grimm brothers horror fairy tale. The bubble bursts when in 2011 the tsinoy asks the foreigner to pay millions to their uncle who poses as a businessman who allegedly owns all the computers in the foreigner’s offices. The foreigner asks for accounting for he knows all the equipment should already be paid for. The tsinoy pressures Mike to no avail. Mike wants accounting for the last 6 years and is adamant on it. The tsinoy Gus knows the game is up. Thus he rallies his tsinoy family, conspires with his underlings, and raids the foreigner’s offices at an opportune time, trying to get all the main servers and data of the foreigners clients, without which the foreigner can’t operate nor can he collect past due accounts. The foreigner tries to defend himself, but as his lawyer has just left for a month long vacation to Europe, there is not much that he can do. And the tsinoy knew that. For he and his cohorts have planned everything well, from execution of the raid to tactical support in the aftermath. He has already prepared a new office and he transfers all the stolen equipment there. He then sends his underlings, who have been poisoning the minds of the workers working for the foreigner for the past year and a half, and thus have maintained people totally brainwashed to their cause. He uses the age old “oppressed pinoy by an exploiting green-eyed devil foreigner” formula to a great extent, and as all his workers being pinoys, have long fallen for his wily tricks. The tsinoy has also used the same trick on members of the Rotary civic club of which he and the foreigner Mike were members and on local politicians too. He is successful in painting an extremely bad picture of the foreigner. As Mike is not well versed in local customs and ways, he is no match to the wily ways of Gus and his 11 cohorts. The tsinoy has thus taken the foreigners business, by taking his equipment, his accumulated data, his time tested processes, his well trained employees, and all his international clients. He then starts serving said clients as if nothing happened, and sure enough, the clients start paying the tsinoy for past due and due work done, for the tsinoy is the only one now who can deliver work direly needed by the clients due to close business deadlines. All the while the foreigner is trying his best to get his business and his clients back. He reaches a low point for his clients won’t pay him his past due billings of 3 months and in one instance 4 months, for which he had already made payroll. The foreigner now realizes that he has to start afresh and that he has lost his clients and 8 years of painstaking labor to the tsinoy. All the foreigner can do now is file multiple criminal and civil cases and wait for the justice system to grind its wheels slowly towards an end in which the foreigner might not be the victor. All this while the tsinoy Gus will be making money from Mikes clients, procuring Mikes business processes and tools, all this for no investment, be it in capital or in time resources, at all. He can easily pay a battery of lawyers (8 lawyers in this case), and can delay the justice system, for he is making good money from the business that he stole. The ironic thing is that pinoys, educated ones at that, still fall for the brown man vs. white man routine or propaganda, they still think in colonial ways in this modern time and age, and thus swayed, support the wrong elements within the Filipino people, just for the mere fact that the offended party is a white man. What happened to right and wrong? Where is fair play? Are these forgotten terms of the old? Do we start ganging up on all foreigners who try to invest in the Philippines now, even though they try to elevate us from our economic dire straits? Then how can we blame these well wishing foreigners, who go back to their respective countries after getting royally screwed here in the Philippines, from ganging up on pinoys there? Or is this another routine of “I can do to you but you can’t do the same back to me or mine?” We then start labeling these foreigners as tyrants and racist but we don’t seem to realize that we started the buck moving and these foreigners are just passing it forward. Either we start realizing that condoning such thievery has a long lasting effect; where innocent, hard working migrant Filipino workers will suffer for our misdeeds here while they work and toil in foreign lands, or we should all join the club of Gus and his cohorts and steal all the foreign investor’s blind. This way we could alienate our whole race from the outside world and no one would ever invest in or hire pinoys. The choice is ours. So is the shameful outcome of our bad choices.
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