The Verité Southeast Asia Team
Marie Apostol
Founder & Executive Director
Marie founded Verité Southeast Asia in 2014.
She led the development of the Verité Systems Approach For Social Responsibility, the Verité Fair Hiring Toolkit, and prepared the original draft of the Manpower-Verité Ethical Framework for Cross-Border Recruitment.
She has trained and consulted for companies such as Starbucks, Apple, The Home Depot, Walmart, Gap, Levi Strauss, Hewlett-Packard, New Balance, Hershey’s and Motorola, in the improvement of internal and supply-chain-level programs, systems and organizational competencies for managing Corporate Social Responsibility.
Prior to her work with Verité, Marie served as an independent consultant on poverty alleviation and social reform and worked on projects for the Philippine Government, bilateral agencies, international NGOs, and a number of UN agencies.
She is also the founder of The FAIR Hiring Initiative. The initiative is a social enterprise that develops, tests and promotes ethical recruitment models and addresses issues of forced labor, debt bondage and human trafficking in labor migration.
Coco Bagadion
Managing Director & Program Advisor
Coco provides consulting, training and support services for SR compliance management and strategy programs, standards development, auditor training and certification, compliance audits and verification assessments, and corporate and factory or field level corrective actions.
He has worked with companies in various industries in successfully implementing their SR programs.
Prior to joining Verité, he held a variety of executive, line management, and staff positions spanning 25 years in the corporate sector. His last position was as vice-president responsible for business performance management and strategy development in a leading multinational pharmaceutical company affiliate in his country locale. He also holds 20 years of factory management experience in a couple of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants wherein he received Corporate management recognition for his factories’ achievements in worker improvement teams, productivity, and compliance management systems.
Coco is an engineer by education and has attended corporatesponsored specialized management and technical training in the USA, Europe, Japan and the Philippines.
Audits & Supplier Engagement Team
Joey Pacis
Senior Director for
Audits & Supplier Engagement
Joey has been conducting social audits and assessments for more than 10 years. He leads VSEA’s Audits and Supplier Engagement team and is responsible for organizing regional audits and other social responsibility engagements in the region.
He is a trained Social Auditor under the RAISE 1000 Program and has undertaken numerous social audits in the Southeast Asian region as a Verite Network Partner since 2007. He has likewise served as audit team member for social audit engagements in the US since 2008. As Social Auditor, Joey is knowledgeable in assessing various Code of Conduct elements such as the RBA (formerly EICC) and similar codes of conduct, and in workplace health and safety requirements. He possesses strong investigative skills in the conduct of audit interviews and documents review.
Joey is a graduate of Industrial Management Engineering from the De la Salle University in Manila, Philippines. His 22 years of work experience crosses diverse industry sectors such as automotive, semiconductor electronics, plastics packaging, cement and construction with both local and foreign companies in the Philippines. His competencies include supply chain management, production operations and management, systems analysis and process improvement.
Kat Abrigo
Sapana Basyal
Noli Cruz
David Errington
William Ragamat
Eden See
Angel Tatlonghari
Grace Vu
Charlin Wong
Capacity Building & Consulting Team
Jet Urmeneta
Senior Director for
Capacity Building
& Consulting
Jet has 20 years of experience working on labor, human rights, and global supply chain social responsibility issues.
Her current responsibilities as Senior Director for Capability Building for the Southeast Asia Region, include developing Social Responsibility programs for various stakeholders (Brands/MNCs/Buyers, Vendors/Licensees, Suppliers/Factories, Contractors/Subcontractors, Workers, Governments, Employers’ Confederations, and Auditors/CSR practitioners) to find solutions, and develop strategies to address recurring social responsibility & compliance issues.
She has significant international experience on issues of Forced Labor and Trafficking, and implementation of ethical recruitment and employment standards. She is one of the lead consultants in the implementation of Employers Pay Model for the recruitment of foreign workers for Suppliers in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. She has conducted assessments of different migration corridors on forced labor risks and issues, and leads audits for special investigations for factory based foreign contract worker recruitment practices.
Cezar Bagadion
Senior Director for
Strategic Learning & Organizational Development Solutions
Hands-on experience and insight from over 20 years of line management work in the areas of organization development, capability building and talent management characterize what Cezar brings into the Verité Programs he leads and manages.
He joined Verité in 2010 and has done audits and program assessments in the fields of Palm Oil, Garments, Fishing and Electronics.
Prior to joining Verité, he spent 13 years as the Country Learning and Talent Manager for Unilever (SEA Cluster), a leading multinational company producing personal care, home care goods, and food products.
Kria Jopson
Panyarak Roque
Ria Sarmiento
Research & Stakeholder Engagement Team
Daryll Delgado
Senior Director for
Research & Stakeholder Engagement
As Senior Director of the Research and Stakeholder Engagement department of VSEA, Daryll designs, implements, and manages multi-country programs geared towards understanding and improving working conditions in the agriculture, electronics, apparel, footwear, and food manufacturing sectors in Southeast Asia, as well as, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
She directs the Southeast Asia research team, and is principal investigator for Verité’s publicly funded research on forced labor and trafficking in persons.
Daryll is a key contributor to Verité’s public toolkits and primers on various labor issues. She is an accredited lead auditor by IRCA, RAISE, and the EICC, and conducts social responsibility audits and assessments globally, and trains and manages audit teams throughout Southeast Asia. Apart from work with Verité, she is a journalist, a former university lecturer, and a published book author.
Louisse Borela
Maecel Cayanan
Shantoy Hades
Veronica Iswinahyu
Leoni Ngo
Gabriella Pontejos
Renata Sandhi
Melissa Villanueva
Bloom Siriwattakano
Operations Team
Melizel Asuncion
Senior Director for
Operations
A lawyer by profession, Melizel has been involved in human rights work for the last 15 years. She is currently VSEA’s Senior Director for Operations. She has extensive research, auditing and training experience on and for various industries.
She has been managing research projects and multi-stakeholder initiatives on fishing, electronics, garments and palm oil, among others.
In 2012, she co-organized with the ILO a study tour for the Employers Confederation of Thailand and Thailand Frozen Foods Association to the Philippines, and she has been researching on various human rights and labor issues around the fishing industries in Southeast Asia, most specially, Thailand.
She is also currently involved in engaging various stakeholders in government, labor, industries and multinational companies on critical and emerging labor issues across Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
She is part of the global research team working on foreign contract labor in formal manufacturing and agriculture in Southeast Asia. As part of her work, she conducts research on SEA countries` policies on foreign contract workers and outsourcing mechanisms. She also organizes and conducts capacity-building activities in SEA for governments, workers and employers on labor law and code of conduct standards compliance.
