Ricardo Buerom Yanson legacy – 4

By Modesto P. Sa-onoy

 

The premonition of Ricardo Yanson of a family feud proved to be right. He died in October 2015 and by the first week of December of that year, huge withdrawals were made from company funds. In late 2018 attempts to reconcile the books failed. Recriminations seeped into the family and accusations of unauthorized withdrawals, a case for malversation was filed against suspected employees, and the wild winds turned into a tempest and brought the internal conflict into the public square as the transportation business of the family affected public interest.

As claims and counterclaims erupted from among the feuding family members, it became clear that favoritism that the elder Ricardo Yanson loathe as toxic against family harmony triggered the conflict. What Ricardo was unable to anticipate or perhaps only as far as the public was able to perceive was that favoritism involved personalities outside the immediate family.

Moves that clearly would splinter family unity pervaded and enveloped like a dark cloud in the Yanson family. His moves – divestment and Family Constitution – were unable to stop favoritism that emerged and overshadowed the family cohesion that he wanted to live beyond his grave. I wonder though whether he knew or had experienced favoritism and ill-will within the family circle during his lifetime that led him as well to divest himself and his wife from the family fortune.

An apparently irreversible course of family conflict that Ricardo tried hard to prevent broke into two camps – two siblings allied with their mother and four sticking together against the other.

Attempts at reconciliation failed when people outside the family with clear intentions of helping themselves at the glittering pieces of a splintering family came into the picture, exploiting the weakness of the human nature for their financial advantage and the detriment to the Ricardo Yanson legacy.

Ricardo’s legacy – family unity for the preservation of the fruits of his and Olivia’s labor – was shattered. His mechanism – divestment and family constitution failed.

The scheme would have succeeded but it is anchored on fidelity to family unity and without reservations. In their divestment from the Vallacar Transit Corporation, he ensured that Olivia was well protected with funds entirely her own, more than enough to last for more than ten lifetimes.

The family feud can never be fully understood beyond what we see or read in public. There must be underlying factors beyond monetary considerations because all parties in the family had been well provided financially. More so we cannot fathom the depths of the human heart. However, as William Congreve, an English writer of the late 17^th century wrote in his play, The Mourning Bride, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

In a case that Olivia filed to disinherit her four children from her properties one reason she cited was disobedience of the four children, Roy, Celina, Emily, and Ricky. I will not dwell on the motivations except that which she filed in court, but her action must have been motivated by elements or factors that she did not mention in her charge. We leave that to the court to determine the validity and justness of her claim.

We know that at the rate our judicial system moves, overburdened as it is, this case may not be decided for years. In the meantime, the pain of the unforgiving will only become worse into furious hatred. Hate like love grows but hatred is insidious as it gnaws and distorts the mind into aberration.

Aside from this disinheritance case, there are other cases against the four children. Those cases do not help find the peace and harmony Ricardo had wished to prevail in his family. I am certain that as I write that both camps are planning moves to fortify their positions and even enlarge the areas of conflict.

The pandemic somehow prevented the escalation of the family war but behind the closed doors, the parties and their retinues are not whiling their time. I just hope that Ricardo is at peace because he is already beyond the dispute but as of now what is certain is that his legacy has been trashed. All his plans and dreams after he left this world had failed. He was right and, to repeat, prophetic about what would happen when he is gone.

But what was destroyed can be rebuilt if his legacy prevailed.