Cleaning up the country club

Perfecto Yasay readily admits to having been offered bribes. "Oh yes, lots of times," says the chairman of the Philippines Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Some have even come from friends and family. "The secret is to make sure your price goes up to levels they cannot reach," he says with a smirk.

Yasay is the man seeking to reform what many consider unreformable - the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). In his personal crusade to clean up the exchange he is predicting at least one jail sentence for a broker before the year-end.

Yasay sits on the eighth floor of a building that until recently was condemned as structurally unsafe. Those who had written the building off were wrong and the exchange's brokers may feel this is an apt metaphor for the SEC itself. Long written off as toothless - in spite of its quasi-judicial powers - the regulator has been transformed...