Word: manila
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DIED. ENRIQUE ZOBEL, 77, Filipino industrialist who, as president of Ayala Corp., helped transform a swampy outskirt of Manila into the city's financial district; in Muntinlupa, Philippines. A scion of the wealthy Zobel de Ayala family, Enzo, as he was known by his countrymen, had a reputation as a high-flying but hard-working tycoon who later became a generous philanthropist, particularly after a polo accident in 1991 left him paralyzed from the neck down. Recalled fellow Manila businessman Guillermo Luz: "He was proud to be the working rich...
...Manila, Philippine police bust a cadre of al-Qaeda members plotting to blow up 12 airplanes, a scheme they called Operation Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for explosion). On a test run, the co-conspirators had planted a small bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight that killed one passenger. Officials finger Ramzi Yousef--the wanted leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing--and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the plot's masterminds. An accomplice of Yousef's, Abdul Hakim Murad, who learned to fly at a U.S. flight school, tells interrogators he and Yousef discussed a plan to fly a small plane...
Henry Sy runs the Philippines' largest retailer, but he operates his SM Group almost as if it were a family-owned corner greengrocery. Each week Sy (estimated net worth: $1.4 billion), sporting his trademark Hawaiian shirt, gathers his six children at the company's warehouse-style offices near Manila's waterfront, where they oversee nearly every aspect of the business. On Saturdays family members fan out to conduct firsthand inspections of their SM malls, department stores and supermarkets. On Sundays Sy, 80, insists that the family meet yet again, either at his $2 million luxury log cabin in the lush...
Things have certainly become more complex since 1936, the year Sy left China for the Philippines to join his father, the proprietor of a tiny grocery store in Manila. In the 1950s Sy opened his own shop, selling shoes. He branched into department stores in the late 1950s and supermarkets in the 1970s. But his big breakout came in 1985, when he opened his first supermall in the Quezon City district of greater Manila, which was then practically undeveloped. The business community expected Sy to lose his (Hawaiian) shirt. Instead, his clean, air-conditioned venue introduced modern shopping...
Still, the Sys worry that in bringing in outside managers, something important might get lost. The collegial atmosphere they have created can't be found in any ordinary boardroom. At a business lunch in Manila, members of the family, each striving to talk over another, banter happily about malls, politics, their kids. When Sy declares, "I've never had an inferiority complex," Henry Jr., the eldest son, quips, "only shopping complexes." The family bursts into gales of laughter. The trick will be preserving what Tessie calls a "continuity of culture," preserving that family spirit even as the Sys' role diminishes...