700 TV5 employees to lose jobs

Published October 2, 2012 9:06pm

Some 700 employees have been retrenched from Kapatid network TV5 following the company's continued financial losses, a Malacañang official said Tuesday. “We have been informed by TV5 management that they have issued letters or notices of retrenchment to some 700 employees of the network,” said Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) chief Martin Andanar at a press briefing. According to the Labor Code, the management has a 30-day period to implement such notice. But according to the present collective bargaining agreement between TV5 management and employees, the notice period is 45 days. “We continue to monitor the developments in TV5 to ensure that all the rights of the employees under the Labor Code are adequately protected,” Coloma said. Associated Broadcasting Company (TV5) is under the supervision of the MVP Group of Companies and MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., but is mostly owned by private individuals and corporations. This supervision, however, does not extend to responsibility over the laid off employees, Andanar clarified. Andanar also said that as far as he knows, the retrenchment will not affect the programming of the station. “This does not cover the programming or operations of the network itself. It only covers the relationship between the management as employer and the employees. As far as I know, wala pong direct effect ito sa kanilang operations or programming,” he said. At present, the government only has one director, Mr. Noel Lorenzana, on TV5’s board after Emmanuel "Noel" Lorenzana, who served as president of TV5, resigned last September 8, 2016. “So meron pa pong isang government seat ngayon that is vacant,” Andanar said.   According to Coloma, the new composition of the TV5 Board reflected the in equity structure as of October 2017 was as follows: 34 percent, Cignal TV Group; 32 percent, MediaQuest Holdings Group; 20.8 percent, MVP Group of Companies; and 14 percent, individual private stockholders."