By Ferdinand Fabella and Rey E. Requejo

THE white knight of the financially troubled Pacific Plans Inc. will meet Tuesday with plan holders, including a group that sued the company’s board and its top management for syndicated estafa yesterday.

The former chairman of Asian Spirit, Noel Oñate, bought Pacific Plans from the Yuchengco Group last December, promising to comply with its court-approved rehabilitation plan.

Despite the sale, a group of plan holders called Parents Enabling Parents yesterday made good its threat to sue the previous owners, accusing them of defrauding 34,000 plan holders by failing to meet their contractual obligations.

The group filed its complaint before the Justice Department. Its president, Philip Piccio, said the suit against the Yuchengco Group and Pacific Plans officials was in response to their sale of the company to Abundance Providers & Investments Corp., owned by Oñate.

The group said the sale was an exit strategy that enabled the Yuchengcos to avoid fulfilling their obligations to plan holders.

But Pacific Plans lawyer Ronaldo Geron, a board member of Abundance Providers, said the company would continue with its rehabilitation plan, and that Oñate would be meeting with plan holders precisely to address the plan holders’ concern.

Commenting on the suit, he said: “We were surprised because it happened when everybody should be talking about rehabilitation and maturing claims.

“What grounds did they have? The sale was already consummated.”

Geron said the suit would not affect the rehabilitation program, adding plan holders were unaware that the company had set aside a P12-billion trust fund, which would mature in 2010 and be used to process plan holder claims.

He questioned the Parents Enabling Parents’ claim that they had 3000 members, when court records showed that only 605 plan holders had executed special powers of attorney authorizing the group to represent them in the rehabilitation proceedings.

Court records show Pacific Plans has a total of 308,930 plan holders, 34,000 of whom hold open-ended educational plans.

The company also has 148,175 memorial, 82,253 pensionm and 44,502 fixed-value education plan holders.

A statement from the Yuchengco Group’s Grepalife Holdings Inc., which used to own Pacific Plans, said the new suit would not prosper.

“As records will show, PPI’s financial difficulties and inability to service its traditional education plans were solely due to government’s decision to allow schools to raise their tuition without any limit, a reversal of the policy in place when PPI sold its open-ended educational plans. This development was clearly beyond PPI’s control,” the statement said.