More about the real JdV

By Gerry Garcia

TO some men and women in local media today, print and broadcast, who always find themselves in face-to-face interview with the inimitable Speaker Joe de Venecia, the little Binloc man in his real self, including his memorable past, probably remain unseen. That is, unless some older colleague, like this writer, who has seen JDV up close, dared to come up with eye-popping revelations about the man’s previous life.

In his late teen, Joe worked as a correspondent for local and foreign press. At 18 Joe was already Philippine bureau chief of Pan-Asia Newspaper Alliance, the first Asian news agency.     At 25, he was appointed by then Vice-President Diosdado Macapagal as one of the spokesmen of the United Opposition under the Liberal Party that propelled DM to the presidency against President Carlos Garcia. From here the young de Venecia pioneered in the establishment of the first government radio station in Northern Luzon — Radio Philippine Network  (RPN), giving him access to meeting with statesmen, foreign and local ministers, politicians and businessmen.

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 Joe was barely 30 when, after only two and a half years in Congress, the bi-cameral congress was abolished at the onset of Martial Law and . . . . he returned  to hone his business talent.

He founded Basic Petroleum and pioneered in the opening of Palawan and now Sulu Sea to industrial oil exploration, mobilized hundreds of millions of pesos for the high-risk and high-cost of drilling thousands of meters into the sea until they hit oil in 1974.

De Venecia was practically the first Filipino pioneer in the Middle East and North Africa. In Arab countries where we had no embassies then, he brought his own management team, equipment and workforce, made profits in foreign countries, drilled the first Filipino oil wells in the Arab world until…. they met financial detacle with the eruption of the Iraq-Iran war where they lost $50 million in equipment and remain unpaid with $150 million in contractor awards and claims up to this day.

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 Professorial lecturer and political analyst Florentino Dauz further confirms: Joe de Venecia created companies which in time employed people. He financed the employment of 51,000 workers, including executives, middle managers and workers in the desert nations, brought joy to the homes of those whom he employed.

 

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