GLOBAL accounting group Ernst & Young yesterday denied involvement in the corporate squabbling that resulted in the ouster of the managing partner of SGV & Company, the country’s biggest auditing firm.

“We strongly deny any involvement or any interference in the internal affairs of SGV,” Ernst & Young’s lawyer Perry Pe, senior partner of Romulo Mabanta Buenaventura Sayoc & De Los Angeles, said in a letter to Standard Today.

“Our client has neither intentions nor ambitions of taking over or of controlling SGV. Our client has been affiliated with SGV since 2002 and before that SGV was affiliated with Arthur Andersen,” Pe wrote.

“In all those years, our client has not and has never violated any Philippine law relevant to our business and affiliation with SGV. We were informed that what has happened in SGV was simply a reconstitution of its own leadership in line with its own internal rules and agenda.”

Ernst & Young said news reports made it appear the company was behind the ouster of David Balangue as SGV managing partner, and after 71 of the company’s 84 partners agreed to replace him with second-ranking Cirilo Noel on Feb. 3. But the partners retained Balangue as chairman.

One source downplayed the corporate dispute as “honest differences of conviction,” saying the partners had already been discussing the matter months before Balangue’s ouster.

“The debate is not really about Ernst & Young, but about a few provisions in the internal agreement,” the source said, referring to the document that sparked the partners’ debate.