AN ENGINEER

WHO BECAME A
GENERAL MANAGER
OR
PRESIDENT OF A
COMPANY

Submitted to:
Mr. Jacob Dizon
Submitted by:
Gazelle Joy C. Ulalan
 GERONIMO Z. VELASCO
1927 – 2007
Geronimo "Ronnie" Zamora Velasco, who built the Philippines' power system, including
Southeast Asia's first nuclear power plant, while serving as the Minister of Energy and CEO of the
Philippines National Oil Company during the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to
1986, died on July 17, 2007 at the age of 80, in San Francisco, of a heart attack.

Velasco was born in 1927. He was the only son of the late Urbano Velasco, veteran reporter
of the daily newspaper in Spanish, La Vanguardia. Velasco got his primary education at La Salle
in 1934 and graduated from high school in 1946 in the same school. After high school he took up
mechanical engineering at the Mapua Institute of Technology.

He worked with the Republic Glass Corporation in 1961 and later founded the Hawaiian
subsidiary of Dole (pineapple) in the country. He managed Stanvac, a branch of Standard Vacuum
Oil Company of America. This company was bought out by the Philippine government and
converted to Petrophil. He became the CEO and President of the Philippine National Oil Company
which was established in 1973 because of the Presidential Decree (PD) 334, which imports billions
of dollars' worth of crude oil needed by the country. PNOC acquires ESSO Philippines, Inc., and
majority equity interest in the Bataan Refining Corporation (BRC).

When the Ministry of Energy was created in 1979, Velasco, was appointed by President
Marcos, as it first Minister. He remedied the country's dependence on Middle East oil and lessened
the huge expenditure of our dollars by establishing geothermal power, and the use of other
alternative sources of energy including the development of nuclear energy. In 1973, the country is
92 percent dependent on imported oil. This was reduced to 57 percent in 1984 and further to a 44
percent in 1985 under the genius of Velasco.

Velasco was unceremoniously dumped from his position as Philippines "Energy Czar"
when George Shultz and Paul Wolfowitz orchestrated a "regime change" military coup against the
Marcos government. In February 1986, he left the country after Marcos went into an exile. The
immediate consequence of that imperial act was the mothballing of the completed nuclear power
plant, thus destroying in one shot the potential for the Philippines to emerge as a modern industrial
nation, as envisioned by the President Marcos plan for 11 major industrial projects.

Ronnie Velasco has gathered a fistful of honors. In 1960, local newsmen named him an
“outstanding and distinguished contributor to business and industry.” In 1962, he received the
outstanding alumnus award of Mapua. In 1975, La Salle accorded him the same honor. In 1978,
Mapua bestowed upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Science, and La Salle followed in
1979 with a doctorate in industrial management and engineering, honoris causa. Philippine
Women’s University gave him a third honorary degree, Doctor of Laws, in 1981.
 Corazon Aquino through the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG)
charged Velasco with having allegedly committed corruption, only to be declared later innocent by
the Supreme Court.

Twenty years later, in 2006, Velasco released a book, Trailblazing: The Quest for Energy
Self-Reliance, which revealed both the dynamic development policies of those years, and the lies
and foreign manipulation which led to the 1986 destruction of the Philippines' potential.

He had a deep regard for the American System and the U.S.A., where he developed his
business skills as a young man and was saddened to see the destruction of the machine tool capacity
then taking place in the United States. Velasco said that "the strength of America was its capability
to manufacture. Nobody else could manufacture with the strength of market you have, with the
strength of the quality that you could do, and in the capability that your people had. But this seems
to be disappearing now".

In 2006, Ronnie Velasco was full of humor and goodwill, but also saw little hope that his
nation could get through the disastrous economic crisis afflicting the Philippines. Velasco
explained that the Bataan Nuclear Plant had been shut down not for technical reasons, but from
political pressure, from forces outside the nation, and called for the people present to take
responsibility for exposing the myths and lies which had allowed the population to accept such an
attack on their own future.