THE booming gaming business in Metro Manila might be all about getting the newest and flashiest local or overseas performers but it appears that players at Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.’s (Pagcor) provincial casinos prefer a blast from the past. And their preferred star is none other than “jukebox king” Victor Wood, a romantic balladeer who hit it big in the 1970s while the country was under the martial law regime of the Marcos administration.
So San Miguel Corp. has finally decided that it was open to suitors wanting to acquire its 32.8-percent stake in Manila Electric Co. Given that the share price of the country’s biggest electricity distributor is now P384, such a sale makes a lot of sense for SMC head honcho Ramon Ang.
Nothing is in black and white yet but the gaming industry is optimistic it has found the “win-win” framework to preserve the bankability of the Las Vegas-style cluster of integrated entertainment estates now rising in Pagcor City.
Tired of criticisms that its ubiquitous shopping malls were mere concrete boxes sharing the same blueprint over and over, the SM group decided to show everyone that it is capable of matching the country’s most upscale mall operators with its new SM Aura Premier development.
There seems to be little rest for Philam Life president and CEO Rex Mendoza, who is in the middle of efforts to revitalize what was once the country’s biggest insurance firm.
What’s turning out to be a game changer for the country’s fledgling gaming industry—and not necessarily for the better—is a shift in the tax regime from the 5-percent franchise tax on gross gaming revenues to a 30-percent tax on net income. This is seen affecting the bankability of the industry especially as investors had come in on the assumption of a competitive cost structure versus regional gaming hubs.
SM Prime Holdings Inc. president Hans Sy, the designated representative to the SM group’s public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives, did not realize that a lot of manual labor was required to participate in these auctions.
Times must really be tough for some party-list organizations on the financial front. According to our sources, there is at least one party-list group out there that has been trying to raise campaign funds by victimizing oil firms.
Is the group of tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan—through the former’s broadcasting arm, TV5—out to settle an old score with the Lopez family? Some people in the latter seem to think so.
Many trading participants have fond memories of Leonardo Quinitio, head of the capital market development division of the Philippine Stock Exchange, as a “cheerleader” for the local bourse and some were surprised at his unceremonial dismissal. Stockbrokerage Campos Lanuza & Co., for instance, said on its Twitter account that this was “raising eyebrows because [...]
Former President Fidel V. Ramos forced the union of the Manila and Makati Stock Exchanges two decades ago, with favorable results as we now have a single bourse, the Philippine Stock Exchange. What Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima wants to see under the term of President Aquino is to unify the bond and equities market.
This Western Visayan electricity distributor is now sending shockwaves to stakeholders as P825 million of hard-earned funds—equivalent to more than half of its total cash holdings and more so of its equity—have been trapped in Export and Industry Bank, which was shut down by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas last year.
