Top Frontier Investment Holdings Inc. (TFHI), the single largest shareholder of conglomerate San Miguel Corporation (SMC) has secured approval from the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) to list its shares on the PSE next year.
Top Frontier Investment Holdings owns a major stake in SMC but, interestingly, the conglomerate SMC is also the biggest shareholder of Top Frontier.
The bullish trend in Philippine stocks continued today as the benchmark Philippine Stock Exchange index (PSEi) closed at a new all-time high level of 5,218.97.
The index rose 14.14 points or 0.27% from yesterday’s trading primarily due to the upbeat performance of Wall Street hours earlier and optimism over a possible gas find by Philex Mining Corporation (PX) the country’s largest mining company.
Decliners outnumbered gainers, 102 to 79, with more than 5.405 billion shares valued at P7.616 billion traded in today’s transactions.
Today’s highest gaining stocks are as follows:
Did the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila unload more than 1 million shares of Philex Mining Corporation (PX) in April and May 2011 and sold them directly to Chairman and CEO Manny V. Pangilinan (MVP)?
Documents from the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) seem to show that they did. A cursory look at the latest list of the Top 100 stockholders of Philex confirms that the Catholic Archbishop of Manila is not anymore a major stockholder of the company and that MVP has replaced the Church’s spot as the top 15th shareholder.
For most of us, it’s a given that the Catholic Church is rich. Obvious proof of that are their sprawling acres of land, large Church-owned structures and buildings, and millions of pesos of cash collected from mass goers every week.
What a lot of people do not know, though, is that part of the Church’s wealth is its multi-billion peso investments in several Philippine companies. In fact, reports submitted to the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) show that the Church and affiliate Catholic groups are top stockholders in companies such as the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Philex Mining Corporation (PX), San Miguel Corporation (SMC), Ayala Corporation (AC), and Phinma Corporation (PHN), among others.
Philippine Church invested in banks, mining, construction, etc.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila, for example, owns more than 300 million shares of BPI and is the bank’s 4th largest owner.
How much are these shares worth? As of May 2011, this is valued at more than P17 billion. Yes, that’s seventeen billion pesos, with a B.
After a voluntary trading suspension request yesterday, the shares of Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company (LC / LCB), Philex Mining Corporation (PX), and Manila Mining Corporation (MA / MAB) will resume trading today, following a disclosure announcement that PX is entering into a joint venture with Manila Mining in the exploration and development of the Kalayaan Project in Placer, Surigao del Norte.
Earlier this morning, I panicked after logging in to my BPITrade online trading account because one of my holdings, Philex Mining Corporation (Stock Code: PX) was trading at only P7.50 per share.
You can’t blame me. Only yesterday, the stock was trading at P9.40 and a P7.50 market price means a steep one-day decline of 20% (read: WTF! I’m losing a lot of money in just one day!).
My PX shares at P8.80
At P7.50, I stand to lose money because I originally bought PX shares at P8.80.
I scoured local news websites for any update on what caused Philex’s price to drop. I found nothing. Is this the end of my trading account? Should I just accept the fact that I lost a lot of money in this stock?
