[Reuters]

Published date: 7th Dec 1987

7 December 1987

Reuters News

English

(c) 1987 Reuters Limited

MANILA, Dec 7, Reuter – Former Philippine finance minister Jaime Ongpin was found with a bullet wound In the head in his Manila office on Monday in what his son and police said looked like suicide.

Police investigator Romeo Urbana said a guard at the building housing Ongpin’s office found the former minister slumped over his desk with a .38 calibre revolver in his right hand.

He said Ongpin had a bullet wound in the right temple and nothing in the office had been disturbed. “It looks like it was a suicide,” Urbana said.

The former minister’s son Rafael told reporters his 49-year-old father had been depressed since September when he was dropped In a cabinet reshuffle by President Corazon Aquino after months of disagreement with colleagues over the cash-strapped nation’s economic direction.

“He probably took his own life because of deep-seated depression,” Rafael said, adding his father had been very unhappy for the last weeks of his life.

Harvard-trained Ongpin left the government two months after concluding an agreement with 483 creditor banks on rescheduling the country’s 13.2-billion-dollar foreign debt.

The agreement won him praise in some sectors but bitter criticism in others that he had sold out to international financiers.

Aquino said in a statement on Monday: “The sudden death of Jimmy Ongpin shocked me as it must all our countrymen. Jimmy was an outstanding Filipino who had the courage of his conviction.

“He was one of my top advisers, a model of honesty, probity and industry. The tragedy of Jimmy’s death humbles us all,” she added.

Former cabinet colleagues of Ongpin also expressed deep shock at the death.

“Jimmy Ongpin was a fighter. He knew how to fight. It’s very difficult for me to understand that possibility (of suicide),” said Trade and Industry Secretary Jose Concepcion.

Ongpin was one of Aquino’s closest aides in the first months after she took power in February 1986 but drifted apart from her because of disputes with her trusted executive secretary Joker Arroyo.

Arroyo was dropped along with Ongpin in the September cabinet reshuffle.

“There was no point in being there, engaged in a war of attrition. My approvals and recommendations were not moving through the presidential palace with any kind of responsiveness,” Ongpin told Reuters the day he was dropped.

Philippine law barred the independently wealthy Ongpin from private sector jobs for at least a year after

leaving government and he told Reuters he planned to open a consultancy until the deadline expired.

In an interview earlier this year he said he yearned for the days when he headed Benguet Corporation, the country’s largest copper and gold mining conglomerate.

“All of a sudden you are thrown into this completely new world of government and politics. I tell you it’s a very rude awakening. I have never been subjected to so much abuse in my life,” he said.

Ongpin’s brother Roberto, trade minister under former president Ferdinand Marcos, gave evidence on Monday at a senate inquiry on alleged illegal foreign exchange transactions during the Marcos years.

But Aquino’s anti-corruption organisation, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), said there was no connection between Jaime Ongpin and any investigations.

“There is no investigation with Jimmy Ongpin. I don’t want the two tied up at all,” PCGG commissioner Quintin Doromal told reporters. (NO PICKUP)