Ultra bilyonaryo Lance Gokongwei rewarded himself and other top executives of Cebu Pacific with a substantial pay hike in 2021 even though his family’s budget airline sank deeper in red ink.
Gokongwei has also increased the compensation budget for CEB’s officers in 2022 with salaries and perks going back to pre-pandemic levels.
In a report to financial authorities, Gokongwei and top officers of CEB pocketed a total of P266.426 million in salaries and bonuses in 2021, 23 percent higher than the total remuneration package of P216.92 million in Covid-stricken 2020.
The CEB president and CEO and four other highest-paid executives – Andrew L. Huang (CFO and chief compliance officer), Alexander G. Lao (chief commercial officer), Jose Alejandro B. Reyes (chief strategy officer), and Michael Ivan S. Shau (chief corporate affairs office) – accounted for 40 percent or P107.353 million of the 2021 executive pay.
CEB’s losses worsened by 12 percent to P24.899 billion in 2021 from P22.236 billion in 2020. This is largely due to lower passenger revenues (down 50 percent to P6.289 billion), higher repairs and maintenance (up 12.8 percent to P9.654 billion), and market valuation losses of P1.318 billion.
CEB said: “There has been no executive pay rises since the onset of the pandemic. In addition, executives took significant pay cuts during 2020 to assist the corporation in its management of the crisis. During 2021, the level of pay cuts (were) reduced and 2022 should see a very slight increase in executive compensation from 2021.”
Gokongwei has proposed to increase the executive compensation package by 6.3 percent to P283.2 million in 2022 which is the same as the pay level in 2019. Gokongwei expects to restore CEB’s pre-pandemic capacity this month but he admits that revenue is likely to hit only 60 percent of its 2019 level.
With the global travel industry grinding to a halt following the outbreak of COVID in March 2020, Gokongwei laid off 30 percent or around 1,300 of its workforce in the middle of the pandemic.

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