The following article  in the 6 July 2010 issue of  the Philippines’ premiere business newspaper, BusinessWorld featured Ambassador Rigoberto Tiglao  who started his journalistic career in 1982 at Business Day, the predecessor entity of BusinessWorld.

The Tenacious Mr. Tiglao

By Anna Patricia G. Valerio, BusinessWorld

UNLIKE MOST DISSIDENTS in the Martial Law era, Rigoberto Tiglao was sent to jail even before he could lash his pen at the repressive regime.

Imprisoned with his late wife, the feminist Raquel Edralin-Tiglao, for being ardent activists during Marcos’ dictatorial rule, Mr. Tiglao was released in late 1970s after spending almost two years in jail.

But his ordeal had far from ended. Finding a job right after captivity proved to be a challenge, given the scarlet letter stamped on members of the anti-Marcos underground movement. “With a family to support, I joined an Ateneo research institution and then, because of higher pay, [I moved to] the Development Academy of the Philippines,” he says. But it wouldn’t take long for the state-run organization to throw him out upon orders from the military intelligence, who identified him as a security risk.

It was the Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, set up by the late political writer Adrian Cristobal and staffed by Conrado de Quiros and Luis Teodoro, that took him in until he landed a job at Business Day. A fellow Marcos critic, Abrino Aydinan, had just gotten a stint at the newspaper, and told him the company was unbiased with its applicants: it would employ political “ex-detainees” at the time when most firms considered them social outcasts.

He started as a “beat-less” reporter under then Business Day managing editor Jose “Ping” Galang, covering topics that ranged from corporate strategic management to human resource development—tasks which, given the political atmosphere at the time, failed to set him on fire. “The economic roof was falling, as the first global debt crisis that Latin America had triggered erupted and exposed the weaknesses of the Marcos regime’s economic fundamentals. [I had a sense] that it would be hitting the fan soon,” he says.

But Mr. Tiglao managed to uncork major stories on his own: he once convinced a human resource manager to hand him a copy of a survey on executive pay rates in the country—a report that companies had to pay for, but which Business Day ended up publishing for everyone’s perusal.

His resourcefulness won him bigger beats, including a rather colorful shift at the Central Bank of the Philippines, the forerunner of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). When he wasn’t sniffing around for soundbites from the bank’s top brass or tweaking its poorly written press releases, Mr. Tiglao could be found near the photocopying machine, sneakily getting his hands on top secret World Bank and International Monetary Fund reports. “[The clerk would photocopy] the minutes of a Monetary Board meeting, and recklessly throw away imperfect copies, which of course I got. I would write stories based on these fully confidential reports as if they were just routine information,” he says. It was only a matter of time before he gained access to an executive’s quarters—by befriending one of the staff members. “That person would allow me to rest in the official’s office, with all his files lying around.”

All this digging ended in the afternoon, when Mr. Tiglao would rush back to the office to hand in the day’s bounty to his editor. “There weren’t cellphones or e-mail then, and even faxes were hard to come by,” he says.

But his biggest scoop was to come from a rather unremarkable statement. At the end of one of the press conferences called by then finance minister Cesar Virata, Mr. Tiglao approached him to inquire about the import statistics cited during the discussion. “[I asked him,] ‘Were your import figures wrong?’ and he said, ‘I guess so.’”

The reply proved to be critical in uncovering how the Central Bank, in cahoots with the Philippine National Bank (PNB), doctored the country’s international reserves to cover up its bankruptcy. Noticing a marked spike in the import figures, Mr. Tiglao trooped to the Bureau of Import Statistics, a territory unknown to other journalists then, to probe into the numbers’ accuracy.

“The bureaucrats there were also surprised over the figures and were investigating the matter, only to find out that the wrong figure was a manipulation of the PNB to cover up the fact that the country was on the brink of a debt crisis,” he says. The exposé helped bring forth the New Central Bank Act in 1993, which called for the establishment of the BSP, an autonomous monetary authority.

On a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism At Harvard University, Mr. Tiglao came across Howard Simons, the foundation’s curator. Mr. Simons had just resigned from his prior post as managing editor of The Washington Post, where he directed the paper’s famous coverage of the Watergate scandal.

“After many discussions, I asked him if he could fund a research on investigative journalism in the US,” says Mr. Tiglao. Mr. Simons obliged, enabling him to conduct interviews with several American investigative journalism centers. It was a study that prompted him, along with eight other local journalists, among them Sheila Coronel and Malou Mangahas, to establish the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in 1989.

For all his dogged determination to dig up newsworthy accounts, Mr. Tiglao also knows when to put the dot on a certain story. “Plan for tomorrow,” says the former presidential spokesperson. “Know when your cheese is moved, and move on.”