Tonyboy, Manny prepare final offer to First Pacific

Businessman Antonio O. Cojuangco and Manuel V. Pangilinan, chairman and president of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), respectively, are now finalizing along with a foreign strategic partner their offer to acquire the 24.4-percent controlling stake held by Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co. Ltd. in the country’s largest telecommunications company.

Highly-placed sources told The STAR that following the withdrawal by the Gokongwei group of its offer to acquire First Pacific’s interest in PLDT, the top management of the Hong Kong company is now ready to sit down and negotiate with Cojuangco and Pangilinan.

The same sources said contrary to rumors being circulated by a disgruntled former close-in staff of Pangilinan, the PLDT president and chief executive officer who is also First Pacific executive chairman and Cojuangco, whose family used to control PLDT, are still very much together and are in fact making the offer as one entity.

There has been reports (not in The STAR) that First Pacific controlling shareholder Anthoni Salim was trying to woo Cojuangco to his side, but both Cojuangco and Pangilinan said that the reports were based on rumors being circulated to drive a wedge between the two.

It was learned that the Pangilinan-Cojuangco offer had been brought up to the First Pacific directors earlier, but the latter could not officially acknowledge it due to the exclusivity granted to the Gokongwei group which expired last Sept. 30. "But now that the deal with Gokongweis has collapsed and there appears no other serious offer, First Pacific will have no choice but to accept the offer of Pangilinan and Cojuangco if it wants to get its money soon," the source said.

First Pacific last June 4 entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Gokongwei group, represented by John Gokongwei Jr. for the sale of the former’s 24.4-percent controlling interest in PLDT and 50.4-percent share in Bonifacio Land Corp. The agreement called for the creation of a joint venture company to be two-thirds owned by the Gokongwei group and one-third by First Pacific.

In consideration of the two-thirds stake in the joint venture arrangement, the Gokongwei group was going to pay $616.6 million over a three-year period and another $109 million for the Bonifacio Land stake.

However, the MOA contained certain conditionalities such as the conduct by the Gokongwei group of a due diligence investigation of PLDT and Boni Land. The PLDT board and management, led by Pangilinan and Cojuangco, refused to allow the group and First Pacific access to documents and information other than those that were publicly available, saying that PLDT would be subject to undue disadvantage since the Gokongweis own Digital Telecommunictions (Digitel).

Because of the failure of First Pacific to convince PLDT management to cooperate and because it would not agree to buy without first conducting due diligence, the Gokongwei group withdrew its offers.

First Pacific, in an earlier statement, said it is still reviewing its options and strategies as far as its Philippine investments are concerned. First Pacific decided to sell its stake in PLDT and Bonifacio Land in order to raise funds to pay off some of its debts. There were however reports that First Pacific was under pressure from its controlling stakeholder Anthoni Salim, who engineered the deal with Gokongwei, to sell and then declare dividends to its stockholders Salim owes the Indonesian government a huge amount of money.

Because of the collapse of the deal with the Gokongweis, First Pacific is now ready to sell its PLDT and Bonifacio Land stakes separately. The STAR earlier reported that Greenfield Development Corp. owned by Jose Yao Campos and Ayala Corp. is finalizing its offer to acquire First Pacific’s stake in Bonifacio Land. The offer includes assuming a $109-million (principal plus interest) loan owed by Metro Pacific Corp. to another First Pacific subsidiary Larouge BV which was secured by 50.4 percent of Bonifacio Land’s outstanding shares.

Metro Pacific, a First Pacific subsidiary, controls Bonifacio Land which in turn owns the Fort Bonifacio Global City, Metro Pacific’s biggest asset.