Manuel V. Pangilinan

Manuel V. Pangilinan or MVP is one of the most successful businessmen in the Philippines with interests in telecommunications, mass media, infrastructure development, hospitals, and public utilities like water, electricity, mass transit and tollways management.

Pangilinan is a self-made billionaire, born to a bank messenger father who eventually retired as bank president. Pangilinan went to school at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University where he majored in Economics and the Wharton School of Finance & Commerce where he got his masters degree in Business Administration, both on scholarships.

Pangilinan made his name in Hong Kong where he worked in an investment bank. While there, he met Anthoni Salim, an Indonesian businessman who helped him build First Pacific, a “Hong Kong-based investment management and holding company with operations located in Asia-Pacific,” according to its website, with business interests in telecommunications, consumer food products, infrastructure and natural resources.

Today Pangilinan is managing director and chief executive officer of the $7.5 billion company.  He is also the chairman of publicly-listed companies Metro Pacific Investments Corporation, Meralco and Philex Mining. He also holds management positions in these companies’ subsidiaries and affiliates.

He is the incumbent president and chief executive officer of telecommunication giants PLDT and Smart.

Pangilinan built his media empire in the Philippines by way of PLDT, specifically by using its employees’ trust fund to invest P14.5 billion in a company called MediaQuest Holdings Incorporated.

MediaQuest has cross-media ownership in the country from television and radio through TV5 Network Incorporated and Nation Broadcasting Corporation, and other media companies like broadsheet giants Philippine Star, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and BusinessWorld.

In his book Colossal Deception, How Foreigners Control our Telecom Sector, journalist Rigoberto D. Tiglao tracked the ultimate ownership of these companies to Indonesian mogul Anthoni Salim through his HongKong-based company First Pacific.