The Rise and Fall of ECMCO United

I kept saying it for months I must have sounded like a broken record.

“You need to be formally organized so that you’ll have a legal personality. BENECO will not always be in friendly hands. If a time ever comes when BENECO falls into ‘enemy hands’ you can’t fight the enemy from inside. You need a kind of ‘lifeboat’ that you can briefly transfer to. From there you can gather your wits and carefully lay out a plan for retaking the ‘mother ship.’”

I was talking, of course, to members of my Alpha Class—that mythical class of junior law students whose real-life character parallels I used to animate my Facebook School of Law (FBSOL) series of posts from 2021 to the present. (Lately, I have spun off new characters under the guise that the Alpha Class had “graduated” from the virtual law school and moved on, so to speak).

Admittedly, communicating to the public the many-faceted issues surrounding the BENECO-NEA controversy was a tall challenge. Legal talk is generally boring even in the real classroom, let alone a fictional one.

But I discovered that as much as we Filipinos love following Korean telenovelas, I could hold public attention a little bit by loading the facts of the BENECO controversy into a kind of soap opera plot.

My aim was to encourage people to hang on to the public issue—subaybayan, in other words—given that mainstream media was generally snubbing the whole affair. And the simulated law class scenario allowed me to discuss legal concepts at length without having to apologize for being so “academic” or “too technical” and, yes, boring.

Although the FBSOL tackled many general legal concepts, its mainstay topic was BENECO from 2021 until around October 2022.

You can still access the full archive of those “class sessions” by visiting the class website (Yes! It is still up and running) laymanschooloflaw.blogspot.com

If you have the time and patience, you can “back read” all the way back to 2021–I provided an indexed link finder on the side panel of the main page. Then you will be guided through the entire odyssey of BENECO ever since the GM controversy broke out. At the same time, it would quiet any malicious persons who, after amazingly benefiting from the class legacy, would now pretend to be “factcheckers” attempting their own revision of history. Too bad, however, it is impossible to FAKE an archive as extensive as FBSOL.

It wasn’t by design that the witty students of Alpha Class channeled the personalities of prominent MCO’s, it just evolved that way. And I thought as long as the MCO’s of Alpha Class generated goodwill and public support for BENECO, I would keep it that way.

One student in particular, Miss Deema Niwala—fictionally from Tublay, Benguet—rose in prominence to earn the sobriquet of “Teacher’s Pet.”

That’s because whenever I parsed a legal concept into a series of questions in a “graded recitation” I always reserved the correct answer to be recited by Miss Deema. That, along with portrayals of her cute mannerisms like rolling her eyes everytime she disagreed with something the “Professor” (me) said, and stomping her feet whenever she laughed heartily, endeared Miss Deema to the readers.

I varnished that image with gusto. Why not? The public loved a heroine, a kind of MCO “Lara Croft” who plinked swords with the evil NEA empire. She inspired other MCO’s to be vocal as well and she was thrust to the front and center as the virtual leader of the MCO’s.

I had no idea how much real influence the Alpha Class had, until one day BENECO Chairman Esteban Somngi, with the concurrence of the BOD (the authentic one, with the Magnificent Seven), formally invited the Alpha Class to lunch at South Drive. He didn’t mention particular names, he just said “the Board would like to invite the Alpha Class to lunch.”

I was pleasantly surprised. What’s really amazing about the invite was that at that point I had never even really met ANY of my Alpha Class “students.” I just created a chat group, named it after the class, and invited around 10 or 15 individuals who I had been “stalking” on Facebook—mostly on the basis that these people regularly shared my posts in their own pages.

From there we carried out a kind of online “Q&A” on an “unli” basis about the BENECO topic, which allowed me to impart even more direct teachings about the laws on public utilities—as well as try to guide their diverse opinions into a kind of disciplined centralized messaging.

All the time I continued to observe their intricate personalities and used the input to fine-tune their parallel characters in class. I patterned their personality, their language, antics, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies based on what I read from THEIR posts.

Whenever I read something from their pages that exposed them to legal peril, I was quick to warn them and head off any danger. Several times I asked some of them including “Miss Deema” to correct or take down a particular post in THEIR pages that I thought were libelous. Sometimes they listened, two of them did not–and ended up facing two criminal libel cases where their defense is a little bit shaky.

(Sadly none of them do that—share my posts—anymore. They probably don’t even read me anymore, ever since I was expelled from the chat group that I created, believe it or not, after I castigated Miss Deema.)

But at its height, the Alpha Class became so mythically popular that the supporters of their nemesis, NEA’s GM Marie Rafael, even tried to replicate the idea, coming up with their own “Vhalid School of Law,” which I welcomed.

The Board was appreciative, and was beside themselves in enthusing that among all the electric cooperatives in the Philippines, BENECO had the most proactive MCO’s. In time, we included even the Magnificent Seven and GM Licoben in the Alpha Class chat group.

During one meeting of the Board, I remarked that it would be a good idea to formally incorporate the MCO’s into a legal entity. That would cloak them with a separate legal personality of their own.

In fact, I thought it was a shame that no one, since 1978, had ever thought of doing so. It was almost as much a shame as the fact that it was already 2021 and yet BENECO still did not have the exclusive trademark registration for its logo.

The Magnificent Seven all agreed and they encouraged me to push my Alpha Class to act as the convenor group for organizing “MCO UNITED” –and they informally agreed to fund the effort. It didn’t really entail too great of a cost, anyway–just some regulatory fees to be paid to the SEC.

Before the Alpha Class could get any work underway for this effort, I already started using the coinage “UNITED MCOs” in my posts, like that one on November 18, 2021 about our deep appreciation for the four remaining Baguio banks that still honored the signatures of Chairman Somngi and GM Licoben (actually, 3 because GCash was an e-wallet app).

I digress: why “UNITED?” I copied the idea from the European Football League, which included some of the strongest teams who were mainstays in the quadrennial FIFA World Cup. I noted that the strongest teams always called themselves “United”–Manchester United, Lyons United, United Real Madrid, etc. Invoking UNITY was a universal winning formula–something the political strategists of Bongbong Marcos must have duly noted in the May 2022 presidential campaign. Leni used wokeness as her central theme and it sank like a rock.

A few more appearances of the UNITED MCO’s blurb in other posts later, the name began to grow on the Alpha Class members. Finally, around four months later on February 18, 2022, the class members were finally able to register their group as EC-MCO UNITED, Inc.

It was a non-stock non-profit corporation whose business adddress was Inglay Restaurant in La Trinidad owned by lawyer Mary Inglay, whose daughter Mia Magdalena was the first president by acclaimation. (Much of this information has changed, of course, brought about by recent developments which I will get into later–this is going to be a long series)

On its first year of existence, there were no elections held to choose the first set of officers. Besides, there were only a handful of convenors (twelve) that it wasn’t a big hullabaloo to just assign Mia Magdalena (President), Agnes “Beng” Garcia as (Vice president), Virgil Garcia as (corporate secretary), Joy Buyagao (assistant secretary), Dane Ducayag (treasurer), Ofelia “Leigh” and (auditor).

There were six Founding Trustees, namely, Carl Taawan, Joyce Buyagao, Daisy Lee, Zennia Chason, Linda Asuncion and myself.

In hindsight, I should have pushed the convenors to run a series of in-house seminars among themselves first to make sure everyone was on the same page regarding the mission and vision of EC-MCO United, Inc. But being conceived during the critical period when BENECO was literally (as, in fact, it still is) fighting for its life, there was undue haste in launching the group into public advocacy immediately long before it has even broadened and consolidated its grassroots membership. Everything had to be done in shortcut manner, because there was talk of an impending Second Invasion of South Drive anytime. (TO BE CONTINUED)*