Financial advisors for Napocor sale named this week

The Department of Finance (DOF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) will choose within this week at least one or two from the eight financial advisors vying to handle the privatization of the National Power Corp. (Napocor), Energy Secretary Vincent S. Perez said yesterday.

"We are going to select one or two financial advisors out of the seven that we have shortlisted by Friday or by the end of this week," Perez said.

The seven international financial institution selected that are expected to make their respective presentation to the DOF and DOE starting today include: ING Barings-PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Salomon Smith Barneys-Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse First Boston, JP Morgan-Chase Manhattan, N.M. Rothschild and Sons, and Macquarie Bank group of Australia.

Only BPI Capital was reportedly not chosen from the original eight financial groups that have submitted their proposals.

Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho said they will use several criteria on choosing the financial advisors such as their global selling ground, the quality of proposal they would submit, track record, among others.

Perez, on the other hand, said they will also be choosing the financial advisors based on the privatization plan presented by them.

"We want to know how they intend to carry out the privatization such as how they would go about the sequencing of the generation assets of the Napocor to be sold and the list of the prospective buyers they can bring in," he said.

Government is raising about $8 billion from the sale of Napocor assets. Of this amount, some $4.5 billion will come from the generation assets and another $2.4 billion to $2.7 billion from the transmission assets.