Dennis Uy buying H20 Ventures

Dennis Uy

Davao-based businessman Dennis Uy has struck a deal to acquire publicly-listed H20 Ventures Corp. (H20), widely expected to be a potential backdoor-listing for one of the businesses under his fast-growing corporate empire.

Uy’s privately-held holding firm Udenna Corp. agreed to buy a 62-percent stake in H2O but the seller, Jolliville Holdings Corp., must spin off the water utility businesses. This suggests that Udenna is more interested on the shell company than the underlying operations.

Udenna, in turn, will launch a mandatory tender offer to the minority shareholders of H20 in compliance with the local securities law.

“One of the conditions to the H2O sale is the implementation and completion by H2O of a spin-off by selling all of its existing business and assets, including shares and interests in Calapan Waterworks Corp (CWWC) and all other interests in other corporations,” a disclosure by H20 said.

Apart from spinning off the water business, H2O must also do a “clean-up” exercise – collect all receivables, settle all its obligations, assign its contractual interests, transfer or reassign all of its employees and settle and dissolve its retirement fund, based on the disclosures.

Joliville, led by businessman Jolly Ting, believes that the proposed transaction “creates value for the company.” The price of the transaction was yet to be disclosed.