Spare the children

By: Modesto P. Sa-onoy

DESPERATE times require desperate measures. At normal times, Olivia Yanson would not want her grandchildren to be dragged to court on a criminal charge. She would fight to protect them, spend as much money as needed to ensure that her grandchildren will not suffer for life the stain of a criminal. Even if proven innocent of having been criminally charged, a person sued for a crime such as carnapping carries that stigma for life. The records are kept in government custody and will always haunt the child. Surely, Olivia and her stable of lawyers and advisers know that but she wanted that as her legacy to her grandchildren and their children’s children.

The wrath of Olivia Yanson against her children and her grandchildren must be so great that while her grandchildren are struggling against what is considered as an act of vengeance or spite, she would dine in public with a man who had been the cause of this family conflict. What was she trying to prove?

Information says that last week she dined with Rey Repollo in a restaurant in Lacson Street. Repollo, our readers will recall, was charged unanimously by the Vallacar Transit, Inc. Board of Directors of responsibility in the unexplained P380 millions of company funds. Olivia offered to bail Repollo out but when the Board, under Leo Rey, refused to condone Repollo’s actions, Olivia then burst into anger and unleashed the fires of conflict in the company and the family.

Olivia now raised the level of her anger several notches higher and then dine with the cause of the train of events that is now becoming more difficult to restrain, much less stop. It seems now that only the Heavens can intervene to put an end to this conflict but not its stains.

I had been asked several times: what’s with Repollo, about 30 years younger than Olivia, that she preferred him against her children, the company and now even her grandchildren?  What’s in Repollo that Olivia would exchange the love and respect of her children and grandchildren in his favor? Ah! Who can fathom a woman’s heart and the depths of anger?

Does Olivia have the heart and blind anger of Medea, the woman that Euripides wrote about in 431 B.C. who killed her children to spite her disloyal husband? I never thought Olivia, who appeared to be a generous woman, has such anger as to practically destroy the future of her children and her grandchildren to protect a man who had been charged of disloyalty to her household.

But we must yield and accept her decision because she has her own reasons, unreasonable as it may seem to us. Indeed, as in that Greek tragedy, Medea laments, “Manifold are thy shapings, Providence! / Many a hopeless matter gods arrange / What we expected never came to pass / What we did not expect the gods brought to bear / So have things gone, this whole experience through!”

Whatever the heavens decree, let’s leave Olivia and her companions deal with this unexpected twist of a grandmother inflicting harm upon her grandchildren. Let’s just deal with the facts of this case that Olivia, Leo Rey and Ginnette filed against Roy, Emily, Celina and Ricardo, Jr. and their children and several others.

I will not deal with the other details of the complaint filed by employees of VTI against the Yanson 4 and several others. There are enough facts in the news about the complaints. The complainants are within their rights to file the case although they are not directly involved in the family feud. They filed the complaints “on behalf” of the VTI corporation. Proxies, we might just call them.

On what authority did these employees file the cases? What were the complaints about? The news had detailed them.

The separate complaints of Hernan Omecilllo and that of Jerome Seballos focus on the Yanson 4 and their children to have taken properties of the corporation during the turbulent days of PNP intrusion and forcible entry and takeover of the VTI compounds. Without any court order, the PNP invaded the private premises ostensibly on orders or influence of the Yanson 3 camp.

When the news came out about these cases of alleged carnapping and thief of other properties as well as documents, I wondered who these complainants are.

Let’s continue tomorrow.