Tycoon Andrew Tan is again breaking new ground in Spain with the listing this month of Emperador Properties, his personal real estate investment company, on the Spanish stock exchange, the first Filipino company to do so.
Emperador Properties—not to be confused with Emperador Inc, the spirits company also controlled by Tan, and also not related or associated with his Alliance Global Group Inc.—became a real estate investment trust in September 2021 and will be officially listed on Spain’s BME Growth Stock Exchange on Dec. 19.
Today, Emperador Properties has three wholly owned development assets: The 57-story Torre Emperador Castellana and the 35-story Torre Caleido Shopping Center both in Madrid, and the 23-story Torre Diagonal One in Barcelona.
Of these developments, only two—Torre Emperador Castellana and Torre Diagonal One, which have a combined gross leasable area of 86,719 square meters—are listed as real estate investment trust assets of Emperador Properties.
Designed by Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, Torre Emperador Castellana is within Madrid’s financial center and said to be one of the area’s tallest and most exclusive buildings, classified as “excellent” and “exceptional” based on international certificates. Torre Diagonal One, on the other hand, is designed by award-winning architect Enric Massip-Bosch and is located in one of Spain’s major financial centers.
The listing is expected to provide Emperador Properties a bigger platform on which to chart its future growth.
“To be listed in the Spanish Stock Exchange is, for any company, an important milestone. We are looking forward to seeing how Emperador Properties evolves in this new stage. Our commitments to our employees, tenants, and partners remain as present as always in our day-to-day life,” says Emperador Properties CEO Joan Cortés Vilardell.
—Tina Arceo-Dumlao
All apologies
It has been close to 12 years since the March 11, 2011 triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami and radioactive pollution—at Fukushima prefecture in Japan and Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (Tepco) is not running out of opportunities to apologize to affected residents and the world at large for causing “anxiety and inconvenience.”
Kimoto Takahiro, who was working on-site on that fateful day, now has an unenviable job as “risk communicator” in a subsidiary dedicated to decontamination and decommissioning.
Tepco has to keep apologizing for the shortcomings of past company leaders that led to the disaster, solicit the consent of affected communities for steps that the firm wants and needs to do to get rid of 10 reactors, and convince regulators to approve the same.
Kimoto says that it is now so safe to enter the Daiichi complex such that, after milling about on a platform less than 100 meters from the hulking ruins of Units 1-4, visitors are exposed to less radiation than one gets from a chest X-ray.
In June 2016, when the company was under investigation in relation to Daiichi, then Tepco president Naomi Hirose apologized because “our previous leadership failed to live up to the standards of transparency and thoroughness that we strive to meet today,” adding that those leaders “do not represent the Tepco of today.”
In June 2022, current Tepco president Tomoaki Kobayakawa apologized after Japan’s Supreme Court ruled that the company should compensate victims.
Built to provide energy to Tokyo starting in the 1970s, the Fukushima reactors helped rev up the economic powerhouse that is Japan.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, talk about commissioning the $2.2-billion Bataan Nuclear Power Plant is being revived yet again despite its own triple disaster—paying for a white elephant that is unsound in terms of safety and economy, not getting a single watt of electricity for all its worth, and no apology for the suffering it caused to taxpayers who paid for it.