Let us say that you are the president of GSIS or SSS, two government agencies with a lot of money to invest in a corporation like Philex , say. You are then named a director of this corporation and this is quite all right. Those who hold big chunks of stocks usually get to sit in the board of a company.

Officers of the company also usually get stock options in the company and if the company is well managed and makes money, the value of the stocks goes up. If the officer/director exercises his stock option at the right time, he can make oodles of money. Again, this is all legit.

What has to be carefully delineated is this: Are the stocks over which stock options are exercised by the SSS president, sitting as officer/director of Philex, considered as his personal investment? Now this is the more slippery area. The officer/director of Philex has this position ex officio as president of SSS. If I remember the meaning of ex officio it means “from the office” , which means he is in Philex by virtue of his position as president of SSS. My own interpretation is that whatever stocks are acquired by the SSS president sitting in the Philex board ex officio do not belong to him but to SSS.

One ex-general who made several millions as a result of a similar transaction described above claims that those millions belong to him personally because he bought the stocks with money he took out as a personal loan from a commercial bank. Fine. While no money was stolen, the question is one of propriety. Since he was in the board of the company as ex officio nominee of the government agency, all stock options should have been in the name of the government agency, paid for by funds from that agency, and all gains from the transaction should go to the government agency. Perhaps I am looking at this from a very simplistic point of view but I can’t help thinking that there can’t be any other way to look at the situation. But then of course, simple is not how most government officials look at things. Usually “simple” means “sa akin ito”.

While this is not as bad as how things are in other circumstances, this is still another example of how people paid salaries from public funds simply ignore the line that marks the boundary between what is public and what is private. To make the typical joking stance of Filipinos, government vehicles marked “For Official Use Only” should carry a second line that says “ For Private Use Also”.

In July Michelle Obama and her younger daughter spent a couple of days vacationing in Spain. Some family friends joined the trip. Even though the White House office made clear that Mrs, Obama and her daughter, and the friends who came along, spent private funds for the vacation, there was still a lot of negative press. I think Filipinos should try and develop a more watchful attitude towards how public office is used to make private gain.