James Reid with his lawyer Atty. Rodel de Guzman

 MANILA  -- Last July 2, 2024, James Reid, the CEO and founder of Careless, together with his lawyer Atty. Rodel de Guzman met up with Jeff Oh and formalized the termination of Oh from Reid’s company. 

Recently, a notice has been publicly published in Manila Bulletin saying that “effective as of July 2 2024, Jeffrey Hwamok Oh, had ceased all official connections with Careless Holdings Ltd, Careless Music Manila, Inc., Careless Productions OPC, Island City Music PH OPC, Premiere Private Label Inc.”

It further added: “Corollarilly, Mr. Oh no longer has any authority to represent the Careless Group or its officers in any ongoing and future transactions, receive, or dispense any funds or other investments for and on behalf of Careless Group, and/or sign any official documentation and/or correspondences on behalf of the same group.”

Speaking to ABS-CBN News, Reid and Atty. de Guzman explained the reason behind Oh’s termination from the company. 

Reid said it all started when Oh was arrested and detained by the Bureau of Immigration for not having legal documents and permits to work here in the Philippines. Oh is a Korean-American businessman who presented himself as the CEO of Careless and owned several establishments in the country.

Because of the immigration issue, Reid sought the assistance of de Guzman to figure out what went wrong. He asked his legal counsel to do an audit of his company.  

“From his findings, it was his official recommendation, to remove Jeff from all of our operations, because of questionable business practices, lack of permits, this and that,” Reid said.

De Guzman added: “There were many grounds, but the most basic, the most urgent was that, Jeff is a foreigner. At the time of the audit that we did, he did not have complete papers to be able to work in the Philippines. This was the reason why the immigration filed a complaint against him.”

De Guzman added that since Careless is an OPC or a ‘one-person corporation’ under the name of Reid, he recommended that the company loopholes be fixed right away because “if there is any violation committed, it will return back to him (Reid). Siya ang sasabit.”

Regarding the ‘questionable business practices,’ De Guzman elaborated on some of these things.

“Well, may mga questionable, meron talagang mali. Basically, he tried to run the company on his own and represented himself in so many ways, that is not in accordance with legal practices,” he said.

 “And that puts a lot of, um, risk on the company because, James was not aware of a lot of these decisions. On the administrative side, we found that there were a lot of transactions that were not properly documented.”

According to De Guzman and Reid, up to this day they are still receiving and fixing claims on some transactions. This was the reason why they had to call for that urgent meeting last July 2 to terminate and put a stop on Oh’s side.

But prior to July 2, did Reid try to talk to Oh about these ‘questionable business practices’?

“Yes, but you know, he had a way of evading everything. And, uh, delaying. Delaying everything when it came to contracts, when it came to agreements, when it came to a lot of things. He had a way of delaying it,” Reid said.

To clarify, Oh’s role in Careless is just on business development, according to Reid. “He was meant to be, you know, focused on business. Business development. But, more of like a consultant. But he's not CEO. No, he's not actually part of the corporation, you know.”

Oh represented himself as the CEO in some transactions.

“That is why, from the legal side, we were concerned because he was signing documents where he represented himself as the CEO of the company without any, board authorization.” 

Didn’t he have that hunch or sense that something is wrong with how Oh was running things around?

“I always had a bad feeling. I always had, you know. Hunch, but I trusted him.” 

He continued: “All of my friends also were working together with him. So, you know, I wanted it to work out. But then, you know, when all of these things came out,  I thought, this is dangerous. I need to protect myself, I need to protect my artists, I need to protect my friends, my company, and just do the right thing.”

So what are the next steps?

According to Atty de Guzman, “We are continuing to fix all of these loose ends. We are still in the process of completing the audit. But we are already moving forward with our restructuring of the company. So that James can move forward also and sleep well at night, knowing that he's safe.”

He added: “If Jeff comes to us, then I would rather that we sit down so that we can really fix things once and for all. From a legal point of view, we need to complete the due process. And there are a lot of things that we don't know. We are just finding out as we audit right now. Because of the way he managed the company at that time, too many loose ends.”

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