At 9:05 pm on Friday, July 17, an email arrived at First Philippine Holdings Corporation (FPH) from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) “Ad Hoc Committee on Matters Concerning the Lopez Group of Companies.” FPH’s annual stockholders’ meeting (ASM), scheduled for July 27, would have to be rescheduled to a date within 60 days. And a board election, which the committee had already told FPH it could hold on July 27, would still need to happen, just not on that date.
Two days earlier, FPH’s listed parent, Lopez Holdings Corporation, had filed its own notice with the exchange. Its annual meeting, already pushed once from June to August, was being postponed again, this time to September 14, so the company could answer a fresh round of questions the SEC had raised about the documents it must give shareholders before a vote.
And weeks before either of those filings, on July 2, media group ABS-CBN Corporation told the exchange that its own meeting would move from July 24 to August 19, for a reason that needed no further explanation to be alarming: The media giant had received zero nominations for its board of directors.
Three Lopez companies, three postponed meetings. And now, sitting on top of all of it, a US$5 billion offer for the group’s most valuable asset that none of these companies is currently positioned to accept or refuse.
