The image of Figaro Coffee Co., which at one point was trying to compete with Starbucks for dominance in the local market, has sustained a haymaker that most likely it won’t recover from. Well, at least not for a long time.
Last week, the owner of one of its biggest franchisees Promolabels Corp. was slapped by the P-Noy government with plunder raps in connection with a P258-million supply contract, described by current officials as excessive, that was inked with the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) during the time of former Chairman Efraim Genuino.
In reaction, Promolabels president Carlota Cristi Manalo-Tan said she welcomed the case as this would give her the opportunity to prove her innocence as well as disprove the graft allegations leveled by incumbent Pagcor chairman Bong Naguiat et al. which have seriously tarnished her and her firm’s reputation.
The charge sheet said the previous Pagcor board led by Genuino approved a resolution in May 2001 (a scant four months after GMA assumed power) to implement the proposal of Promolabels to set up Figaro kiosks in several Casino Filipino branches with beverage prices similar to those in the malls.
Summoned before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in July 2011, Mrs. Tan vehemently denied accusations that she was a crony of Genuino, and that she had managed to bag the lucrative coffee contract which was awarded to her without the required public bidding out of her own merit.
Unfortunately, she neglected to mention that her husband Johnny Tan was a bosom buddy of the chairman, a fellow member in the Makati Rotary and second nominee of the Genuino-created BIDA party-list group in the 2010 elections.
What was that she said, not a crony?


Take your pick. You choose what proverb you’re comfortable with, because they essentially convey the same message. Especially if you’re fond of McDonald’s hamburgers.
“Caveat emptor.”
“Forewarned is forearmed.”
This is with regard to an e-mail which I recently received from a cousin working in Manhattan about an embarrassing incident featured in one of the local tabloids that took place in a McDonald’s outlet in the town of Temuco, Chile which is some 700 kilometers south of the capital Santiago in South America.
Health officials there have acknowledged the “outrageous” claim of a customer that he had ingested parts of a mouse’s tail while chomping down on a McDonald’s cheeseburger.
The man reportedly said that he noticed something unusual while eating the popular McDonald’s sandwich which looked like a mouse’s tail, and immediately ratted about it to local health authorities.
“There were traces of the tail stuck between the cheese and the bread, and the tail had undergone a cooking process,” one of them confirmed to the media.
Here in the Philippines, this would never have happened.
I am not referring to the part about the mouse tail being discovered inside a McDonald’s hamburger, but that Chilean health officials acted with amazing dispatch on the complaint of a customer and that the story was carried in the newspapers.
Imagine, this incident was supposed to have happened only sometime last June, and here we are after just a few weeks with the results of the investigation they conducted out already.
Mahina lang siguro ang PR ng McDonald’s Chile.



China’s “charm offensive” has trickled down to the Fourth Estate.
The National Press Club has just signed a memorandum of agreement with a big Chinese medical group wherein a maximum of two cancer patient referrals from the Philippines each year would be accommodated and treated at the Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou (MCHG) free of charge up to the time of recovery.
The MCHG is part of the Bo Ai Medical Group which is said to be one of the biggest privately-owned medical companies in Mainland China with 113 hospitals under its wing.
The memorandum of agreement was signed by NPC president Benny Antiporda and hospital director Dr. Wang Huaizhong, with NPC directors Mina Navarro, Joel Egco and Paul Gutierrez in attendance.
While in China, the group also met with Bo Ai chairman Lin Zhicheng who gave assurances to step up efforts to help cancer patients in the Philippines as this would help improve bilateral relations.
Said MoA was facilitated by representatives of China Global News based here in Manila.