MANILA, Philippines ? A new investor has offered to acquire the long-dormant Philippine Stock Exchange trading seat of OCBC Securities Philippines Inc., an affiliate of Singaporean financial giant OCBC Group.

In a memorandum posted on Thursday, the PSE market regulation division (MRD) identified the potential investor as Andrew Chua Lim, who has filed an application for the approval by the PSE board of his acquisition of the trading right. The price tag for the trading right was not disclosed.

Lim is a private individual involved in the garment business. No other information on him was available as of posting time.

The MRD said it would accept comments on Lim's application until March 24 this year.

OCBC Securities is an affiliate of Singapore-based OCBC Group which is one of the largest financial institutions in Asia.

It was among the foreign stock brokerages that shut down its operations in the Philippines during an exodus of foreign brokers in the early 2000s.

New brokers are required to set aside at least P100 million as unimpaired capital, much higher than the requirement for existing brokers.

Based on the new PSE rules on trading rights and trading participants as approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, existing stock brokers must have doubled their unimpaired capital to at least P20 million at the end of last year and further to P30 million by end-2010.

The hike in capital requirement, previously set at P10 million, was meant to prevent failures and protect the investing public.

This was especially in the light of the HK Securities scandal, which was expelled from the PSE because of trading irregularities.

The PSE took control of the trade-related assets of the brokerage and sold its trading right to help settle obligations to clients.

The PSE converted into a stock corporation in 2001 and pursuant to the demutualization mandate of the Securities Regulation Code, listed its capital stock on its own bourse by way of introduction in 2003.

The PSE was converted from a non-stock organization owned by member-brokers to a stock corporation owned by diversified shareholders. The ownership of shares in the PSE was also segregated from the ownership of trading rights at the exchange.