WHILE the Inquirer editors are embroiled in a pecking-order squabble and their columnists busy consorting with and stoking the fires of the oust-GMA opposition, the newspaper owners are quietly crying themselves all the way to the bank.

Make that buying themselves a bank.

According to banker S. Cuttle Butt, the Rufino-Prieto families that control the country’s biggest and most influential tabloid are now seeking Bangko Sentral approval to acquire a sizable stake in Malayan Bank, the Metro Manila thrift bank controlled by the Gozons of GMA Network.

RUFINO-PRIETO

Even before the Bangko Sentral approval, the Inquirer already has a foot inside the seven-branch savings bank in the person of Jay Luzuriaga, the newspaper’s chief financial adviser who is also the bank’s executive director.

In addition to his newspaper duties, Luzuriaga is also president of a new Inquirer affiliate, LINQ Information Entertainment Quadrant Corp, a new media group with offices in Makati and Singapore.

With the foray into banking, Inquirer chairman Marixi Rufino-Prieto seems to be following the footsteps of Bulletin owner Don Emilio Yap, who has the Philtrust Bank to park the business’ sizable collections and receivables.

In addition to the newspaper and the planned banking venture, the Rufino-Prietos easily have the most integrated newspaper empire in the country, supplying newsprint day-after-day to the Inquirer stable from the family’s Bataan and Tipco newsprint companies, to the family’s Print Town Group that cranks out the Inquirer-related titles, and, very shortly, to the circulation group that would distribute the Inquirer publications direct to the subscribers.

The public posture of Code-NGO, the network of Black-and-White Movement and similar anti-GMA organizations, has been for transparency, human rights, and civil liberties.

It came therefore as a bit of shock to discover that the Ateneo-based non-governmental organization actually idolizes Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, who is not exactly known for his civil libertarian and press freedom legacies.

In cooperation with the similar-minded folks at the Ayala Foundation, Code-NGO hosted a Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy function last Friday at the Ayala-controlled Hotel Intercontinental to help spread the city-state’s ideals among its target Filipino publics.

An added fillip to the affair is that the Singaporean government offers study and travel grants to Filipinos, which is music to Code-NGO and similar foreign grant-addicted groups.

HAVING failed despite their arsenal of text and prayer brigades and peer pressure tactics to convince Romulo Neri to implicate Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the ZTE deal, the gays and the angry old maids comprising the politburo of the Black-and-White Movement have now resorted to wicked personal attacks against the former NEDA chief.

Go to the Black-and-White Movement website, and the click on the linked blogs of the different names listed there, and see what we mean.

Over the weekend, after Neri supposedly declined/or had been prevailed upon not to speak The Truth, out-of-the-closet columnist Manuel Quezon III passed off a chain of text messages that reached officials of a telecom company, claiming that the company CEO had donated P1 million to the UP School of Economics for the Diliman professors to sing anti-national broadband, anti-Neri tunes.

Even gay-basher and retired Supreme Court Justice Isagani Cruz set aside his lifelong judicial training, jumped to conclusions way ahead of the evidence — “I am no longer assessing testimonial evidence from the halls of high tribunal,” was his excuse — and pronounced Neri as the most believable of the congressional witnesses, “considering his clean living image.”

Well, we have news for the retired justice, now fellow print traveler. Wait until Sen. Aquilino Pimentel or Sen. Alan Cayetano dredge out the name of a certain Lozada.

THE editors of the left-of-center Philippine Daily Inquirer have been busy these days chasing after stars — themselves.

Just in the last week, the broadsheet changed its editorial staff box not once, not twice, but three times over new editorial titles and, more important, who gets on top of whom.

There’s more.

This weekend, it was the turn of Opinion Editor Jorge Aruta to complain about the rankings.

According to Inquirer’s S. Cuttle Butt, Aruta has obtained the backing of Publisher Isagani Yambot, who despite being listed highest in the newsroom hierarchy, actually defers to the number 2, Editor-in-Chief Leticia Jimenez-Magsanoc, when it comes to editorial operations.

Word is that another meeting has been scheduled this week, this time to discuss the Aruta grumbling.

With Sycip’s retirement, former Central Bank Gov. Jose Cuisia, who holds the title of co-chairman, will proceed on as the sole chairman.