Picked up yesterday the latest FICCO Newsletter dated February 2011 and was immediately riveted to an item in the back page that detailed our credit union’s ill-fated relationship with the Ating Koop movement. It was written by former BOD member Gani Daba.
Any layman reading it unaware of any of the inside scoops other than what had been publicly divulged could easily come to the reflexive conclusion that our credit union has become one big and deep-pocketed political action group that was HAD to the tune of over 11 million pesos. Or in a more benign manner, was treated like a wide-eyed suitor who was sent on a fool’s errand.
Reading and re-reading the explosive itemization one is easily led to believe that this whole affair was one deliberately conscious series of actions by all parties involved which spanned two years and which resulted in a series of very substantial disbursements of credit union funds. One has to confess that one is not privy to or conversant with the nature of all the disbursements, whether they were all in fact outright expense disbursements or whether some funds are recoverable.
But what is true is that any cautious person can not help but be amazed at the amounts involved purportedly to “buy” support for our credit union’s goals and interests from a decidedly political and very politicized group.
But as outlined in the news item all these happened.
Thus, at the very least, all members of the board who participated in the process need to have a lot of explaining to do – to reveal what their roles were in the planning and decision-making, and to own up and take responsibility for these huge losses.
And laying in detail what these “continuing threats of lawsuits” are.
The total amount involved is nothing to gloss over, even granting that FICCO has become a multi-billion enterprise. Because it is still made up individually of more than 140,000 members holding on to precious little resources and trying to make ends meet.
