“Even when we were kids, Carlos Dominguez had a fondness for money and that’s why he’s now the finance secretary,” Duterte told tycoons and major taxpayers on Feb. 6. “I chose him because he is my childhood friend and I trust him.”

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They were biking and basketball buddies and went to the same high school until Duterte got kicked out. And they shared a passion for hunting. Dominguez was given his first rifle before he was 10 and he and Dut would shoot at birds sitting on power lines. Dominguez still hunts, often with his sons, and his family has a house in Portland, Oregon, where he has won state shooting competitions.

Through the years, Dominguez helped bankroll Duterte’s political adventure, from his birth-control projects during the president’s two decades as mayor of Davao City, all the way to the May 2016 polls, without asking for anything in return, according to Duterte. He was a regular benefactor to the charity work of the president’s late mother, Soledad Duterte.

“He’s very focused, very driven, and very passionate with his ideas,” said Joey Leviste, a friend of Dominguez since they studied economics at Ateneo de Manila University in 1961. The finance minister has experience in running every aspect of a business, from managing operations to setting payrolls and meeting the bottom line, said Leviste, chairman of Oceanagold Philippines Inc., who once managed a copper smelter with Dominguez. “Sonny knows what he’s doing on the ground and not from a text book.”

Dominguez says the tax reforms he’s proposing are necessary to keep the Philippines’ credit rating above junk grade. Aside from funding Duterte’s drug war, Dominguez must finance $160 billion of infrastructure projects in the next five years to keep the Philippines among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Boosting revenue will be crucial to keeping the budget deficit from exceeding 3 percent of gross domestic product. The International Monetary Fund is forecasting a shortfall of 3 percent.

“I knew finance would be in very good hands because Sonny is very comfortable with numbers,” said Joey Bermudez, a banker who worked under Dominguez in Bank of the Philippine Islands’ agriculture unit during the early 1980s. “He’s a drill master who wants any execution to be flawless.”

Dominguez’s first banking job came when he was still in college. He took a summer job at Citibank N.A. and remembers being balled out one time by his manager for forgetting to log a 3,000-peso overdraft in the ledger. Once he graduated in the mid 1960s, the bank hired him.

Bermudez said when Dominguez joined client meetings in places like Laguna, south of Manila, and General Santos in Mindanao to chat with farmers and fishermen, he would be interested in the smallest details -- costs of fish pens, the price of cages.

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