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| Photos courtesy of the Manila Times and Rappler |
Veteran columnist Rigoberto Tiglao
wrote in his Manila Times column dated June 26, an in-depth look who is the big man behind Rappler’s Maria Ressa.
Tiglao said his friend and fellow columnist
Ramon Tulfo reported yesterday that Wilfredo Keng, the businessman libeled by
Rappler told him that it was the tycoon
Benjamin Bitanga who invited him to invest P100 million in the internet-only
news site now is also known as the controversial media company, Rappler.
In other words, Bitanga is behind
Rappler, and without Rappler, there wouldn’t be a Ressa. He is therefore the
tycoon behind Ressa.
Bitanga is the financier of Ressa without
his money, Ressa would not be able to spread lies that President Rodrigo
Duterte is suppressing those media that are critical to him.
And even Rappler’s editor-at-large
Marites Vitug wrote in a Japanese publication, “the rule of law is broken in
the Philippines” would be out of job until now.
Tiglao added that when he talked to
Bitanga in 2017 though, he claimed that he had not invested any new, new money
in the company since 2014.
It was the same year that Keng claimed Bitanga invited him to invest P100 million in Rappler. And a year later, in 2015, the two CIA-linked US entities, the Vitug first published an article on Dec. 22, 2011, in Rappler’s Facebook prototype and obviously republished it Jan. 1, 2012, as the banner story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The article falsely and libelously alleged that the
chief justice broke the rules to get his PhD from the University of Santo
Tomas. That was a total lie.
Rappler had been hugely supportive of Aquino. It has not in fact published a single article critical of him and his mother Cory. It has been with the same energy that it supported Aquino that it has bashed Duterte.
Think of any issue the Yellows and even the Reds have
raised since 2016, Rappler has vigorously promoted it.
Talk about press freedom in the
country. Rappler has been, next to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the shrillest
black propagandist against President Duterte and his government.
But who is Bitanga? He is a billionaire
who has expanded his conglomerate under the Duterte administration. Bitanga
says though that he doesn’t have any control over Rappler’s editorial content.
That’s total BS.
Bitanga is well-known among Manila’s
and Cebu’s business elite, with Lucio Tan Sr. and Cebu magnate and former Ramos-era politician Emilio “Lito”
Osmeña had been his biggest business partners in the past.
The well-known businessman, who also owns MRC’s 123-hectare Cebu Techno Park/New Cebu Township in Naga City, Cebu was initially Osmeña’s project, which was given exclusive economic zone status during the Fidel Ramos administration. Its operations as an economic zone is under the supervision of the Philippines Export Processing Zone Authority.
Bitanga even dreams of bringing out the
country’s “third telco,” having bought with Salvador Zamora (the brother of
mining tycoon Manuel and congressman Ronaldo) the old telecom firm PT&T,
which had its 25-year franchise renewed by a Duterte-dominated Congress in
2017.
While so low-key that it is difficult to
find a photo of him in the media, Bitanga is well-known among Manila’s and
Cebu’s business elite, with Lucio Tan Sr. and Cebu magnate and former
Ramos-era politician Emilio “Lito” Osmeña having been his biggest business
partners in the past.
Bitanga also ventured in Menlo Renewable
Energy Corp. got a P3-billion service contract from the energy department for a
60-megawatt solar power plant in Naga City, Cebu.
In 2017, it got a P12-billion contract, in partnership with a
firm of Salvador Zamora, to build a solar energy plant in Clark City.
As Rappler’s biggest
stockholder, he could have simply dissolved Rappler as early as 2017 so as to
dismantle the vehicle by which the lies have been spread.
Bitanga could have fired Ressa
and replaced her with a more competent, less profligate CEO and with an
objective and experienced editor.
Didn’t it even bother him that Rappler helped
politically and literally kill Corona, a fellow Atenean whom we both knew from
our college days and whom he knew was a man of integrity?
And I don’t think even the Inquirer would have taken
in Ressa as a columnist, and I don’t think she can really write. Without
Rappler, Ressa would have been as obscure and ignored as the anti-Duterte
Inquirer columnists.
Now Ressa is the most awarded Filipino-American
“journalist” ever, not for excellence in journalism, but solely because she has
succeeded in convincing US media outfits that she is being suppressed by an
“authoritarian.”
However, Bitanga could reveal that there is really a
bigger, secret Yellow stockholder of Rappler, that he hasn’t been really in
control of it, which would explain his nonchalance over the damage to the
country Ressa has wrought.
There is a basis for that probability: I don’t think
two diehard Coryistas, Solita Monsod and Fulgencio Factoran (who died last
April), who have been in Rappler’s board of directors represent Bitanga.
I told Bitanga back in 2017, that Ressa was
implicitly saying that journalists like me who are questioning her false,
exaggerated casualty figures of the drug war and Duterte’s alleged
suppression of the press, weren’t doing their jobs. That only she is the
champion of press freedom in this country.
Bitanga did nothing. Ressa is the Frankenstein
monster he created. He should be accountable, as much as Ressa is, for the lies, she and Rappler have spread about Duterte and the Philippines around the world.
*I wrote my first article on Bitanga on May 15, 2017,
“Bitanga: The property and mining magnate behind Rappler.”
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