Jose Yao Campos

In 2007, the Marcos family confirmed that the properties surrendered by Yao Campos to the PCGG in 1986 were indeed owned by Ferdinand Marcos, arguing that Yao Campos should not have surrendered them to the government because "under a constructive trust in favor of the estate of the former president."

After the People Power Revolution, Jose Y Campos earned a reputation as the most media-shy of all the Philippines’ taipans. By the time Jose Y Campos died on May 1, 2006, UNILAB had become the Philippines’ largest drug-manufacturing company. UNILAB is currently headed by his eldest child, Joy Campos Hess, and her son, Clinton Hess.

Under Yao Campos, UNILAB remained a proudly non-unionized company, with a company-initiated Employee's Council providing benefits to employees instead of a union negotiating with the company on their behalf. Unionization was so much of "a no-no to the owners" of UNILAB that they went as far as to hire a feng shui expert to redesign their corporate headquarters in response to a 1996 incident in which union organizers nearly succeeded in forming a union.

Yao Campos was in Canada in 1986 when Corazon Aquino’s Revolutionary Government took over the Philippines after the Marcoses were deposed by the EDSA revolution. He was the first among the Marcos cronies to make a deal with the Aquino government in exchange for immunity from suit, and the deal he struck with the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) was one of the agency’s earliest successes.

The 1986 settlement involved PHP250 million in cash and PHP2.5 billion worth of titles to 197 properties in Metro Manila, Rizal, Laguna, Cavite, Bataan, and Baguio—all of which Yao Campos admitted were under his name but actually part of the ill-gotten wealth of Ferdinand Marcos. It also included a building along EDSA in Mandaluyong City, where Imee Marcos had an office before the EDSA revolution, which eventually became the headquarters of the PCGG.

By 1959, after only fourteen years in operation, Yao Campos and Tan, with the help of Yao Campos' brother-in-law Dee, had transformed United Drug into United Laboratories, with the highest share of the Philippine pharmaceuticals market among all the Philippines' local drug manufacturers. This was attributed to the values Yao Campos was said to have instilled in the company, which admirers described as "the Confucian values of hard work, frugality, discipline, perseverance, filial piety to parents and ancestors, love of education and delayed personal gratification."

Yao Campos was an early supporter of Ferdinand Marcos, making campaign contributions as early as Marcos’ first congressional run in 1946. He would eventually become one of the closest among Marcos’ cronies, along with Danding Cojuangco and Roberto Benedicto.

Soon after the end of World War II in 1945, Yao Campos partnered with Mariano K. Tan to build a drugstore on Sto. Cristo Street in Binondo, Manila. (Some sources also mention an American soldier named Robert Horowitz as Yao Campos' partner in charge of production when the drugstore was first built.)

Jose Yao Campos (September 16, 1921 – May 1, 2006), also known by his Chinese name Yao Cho Liat, was a Filipino businessman best known as the founder of United Laboratories (UNILAB). He became an early supporter of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, who tapped him as a "financial advisor." In 1986, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) cited him for having served as a "front man" for various "ill-gotten" wealth, including $52.5 million of real estate representing the most prominent Marcos Mansions. He became the first of the Marcos cronies to make a deal with the PCGG in exchange for immunity from suit. By the time he died in 2006, his family had become one of the Philippines' most powerful business clans, with UNILAB helmed by his firstborn, Joy Campos Hess and her son, Clinton Hess. His eldest son Joselito Campos founded condiments company Nutri-Asia and acquired in Del Monte Philippines and Del Monte Pacific; and his youngest child Jeffrey Campos running Greenfields Development Corporation.