Actress Assunta Rossi and husband Jules give 60% of wealth to farmers

Filippina actress Assunta de Rossi and her husband, Congressman Jules Ledesma, are giving 60 percent of their wealth to the workers of their vast sugar plantation in the central Philippine city of San Carlos.

The actress dubbed this the “largest philanthropic bequest” ever done in the Philippines, saying it’s her and her husband’s version of government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP).

While this would make the couple minor stockholders in the Ledesma Group of Companies, De Rossi clarified that they would still be running their Hacienda Euzkara for the workers.

“Believe me, it’s going to work,” she told entertainment writers over the weekend. “We pray that it’s going to work so that all the other landowners will follow.”

The couple’s combined estates in Hacienda Euzkara cover 28 square kilometres of land, which is bigger compared to the 27.36 sq km covering Metro Manila’s Makati City.

De Rossi said her husband of 11 years had come up with the idea of giving a large chunk of their hacienda to the farmworkers during the 2008 global financial crisis.

“We paid off all the debts of our large estate,” she said in Filipino. “While paying for it, my husband wrote the trust so he could eventually distribute the land. And it’s all free.”

Stressing that the trust is “self-perpetuating and nobody can break it apart”, de Rossi said this could be the reason why her husband was reelected by his constituents as congressman in the first district of Negros Occidental in last month’s polls.

In December 2002, De Rossi, then 19 years old and an award-winning actress, married the then-41-year-old Ledesma in civil ceremonies at the groom’s hometown of San Carlos City.

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