“The story doesn’t end there.”
It seems Megawide’s string of bad luck has yet to end. After its shares plunging by 3.6 percent following the filing of charges against its officers for violation of the Anti-Dummy Law, now comes the dreaded moment—the issuance of warrants of arrest.
Late in November. Regional Trial Court Branch 68 Judge Ferdinand Collantes in Lapu-Lapu City ordered the arrest of 15 executives of the GMR-Megawide Cebu Airport Corporation or GMCAC.
Warrants of arrests were issued against Andrew Harrison, Manuel Louie Ferrer, Edgar B. Saavedra, Oliver Y. Tan, and Jez Dela Cruz, Srinivas Bommidala, P. Sripathy, Vivek Singhal, Ravi Bhatnagar, Ravishankar Saravu, Michael Lenane, Sudarshan MD, Kumar Gaurav, Magesh Nambiar, and Rajesh Madan. According to sources however, they have posted the required P90,00 bail each for their temporary liberty.
Expectedly, GMCAC downplayed the issuance of the arrest warrant as a mere procedural step to acquire jurisdiction over the persons involved in the case.
Anna Salgado, Corporate Communications Manager of GMR-Megawide, even described the latest development as part of the long line of attempts to bring Megawide’s reputation and credibility down, which reportedly began when it bid to rehabilitate the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
However, the story doesn’t end there. It’s about its effects on its sister company – Citicore Energy REIT Corporation or CREIT, which has been given the go-signal to the initial public offering by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In its en banc meeting, the agency approved the registration statements of CREIT covering 6.54 billion common shares.
CREIT is a real estate investment trust (REIT) sponsored by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp. (CREC) and Citicore Solar Tarlac 1 Inc.
Citicore Holdings Investment Inc. is the parent company of Megawide Construction Corp.
The IPO will include up to 1.04 billion primary shares priced at up to P3.15 per share and 1.74 billion in secondary shares to be offered by selling shareholder CREC. It will also offer an oversubscription option of up to 418.33 million 9,000 shares. The shares will be listed and traded on the main board of the Philippine Stock Exchange PSE.
CREIT expects to net up to P3.17 billion from the primary offer, which will be used for the acquisition of properties in Bulacan and South Cotabato. Meanwhile, CREC will receive the entire proceeds from the secondary offer, which could amount to P6.61 billion, assuming the overallotment option is fully exercised.
New investors will corner 49 percent of CREIT’s issued and outstanding shares, while existing shareholders will retain 51 percent, assuming the full exercise of the overallotment option.
Originally, the offering was supposed to run from November 26 to December 3, in time for the shares to be listed on the PSE on Monday, December 13.
However, sources bare the timetable was moved to early 2022 with the new schedule calling for CREIT’s final pricing on January 26, with an offer period between February 2 and February 8, and an IPO listing on February 17.
Megawide justified the new timetable for the IPO saying the scheduling of IPOs is handled by the Philippine Stock Exchange, and CREIT’s preliminary dates were pushed back a couple of months by the PSE to prevent its offering from overlapping with another “dividend play offering.”
By rescheduling CREIT’s IPO, Megawide said they will have an uninterrupted book-building process, which is important considering the IPO’s international tranche, considering the month of December is laden with holidays.
While those reasons cited by Megawide may be true, sources say the main reason for the postponement of the IPO is the current mess Megawide is currently embroiled in.
Thus, the source says Megawide or CREIT or even their mother company, Citicore Holdings, may be buying time for Megawide to resolve their issue, thus paving for a more favorable atmosphere once CREIT’s IPO starts running.
Well, they still have more than a month to untangle the mess Megawide has got into. Maybe by that time, the condition would be more conducive then for CREIT. We wouldn’t want an IPO opening on a losing streak just because of some misdeeds allegedly committed by its sister company.