Gokongwei wife, daughter welcome Year of the Pig with P6.6 B Rustan’s rewards
Taipan John Gokongwei’s wife, Elizabeth, and their daughter Lisa have disposed of their shareholdings in Robinsons Retail Holdings ahead of the Year of the Pig, apparently as a consequence of the Gokongwei clan’s share-swap acquisition of Rustan’s Supermarket chain.
Those twin disposals, if a DBS Group Research is accurate, should have given Mrs. Gokongwei and Lisa more than P3.3 billion reasons each to celebrate the Chinese new year.
According to regulatory disclosures, Elizabeth and Lisa held 2.55 percent stake each in their listed retail empire before last year’s share-swap deal with Dairy Farm, the Hong Kong conglomerate that owned the Rustan Supercenters Inc.
By the start of 2019, mother-and-daughter had disappeared altogether from the public ownership report released by Robinsons Retail, along with the 35,317,500 shares that each held.
In addition to the Gokongwei mother and daughter disposing their personal shareholdings, the rest of the Gokongweis also had their respective Robinsons Retails stakes reduced to as follows:
• James Go: 2.03 percent (from three percent).
• Lance : 6.82 percent (from 9.15 percent).
• Robina: 5.7 percent (from 7.65 percent).
• Faith: 1.9 percent (2.55 percent).
Taipan John Gokongwei on record owns just one qualifying share.
The Gokongwei family’s holding company within Robinsons Retail, JE Holdings, also saw its shareholdings reduced post-merger to 30.9 percent from 35 percent.
The rest of the Gokongwei shareholdings — the Gokongwei family said it effectively owned 51 percent of the expanded capital of Robinsons Retail after the merger — are apparently held in street certificates.
The reductions came after Robinsons Retail announced in late November that “certain members of the Gokongwei family intend to sell, in aggregate, 96,219,950 shares to GCH Investments Pte Ltd, which is also a wholly-owned member of Dairy Farm.”
According to DBS Research, the share-swap deal pegged the value of Robinsons Retail at P94 a share, which means that the 96-million-plus shares held by “certain members of the Gokongwei family,” equivalent to 6.1 percent stake in Robinsons Retail, were disposed at over P9 billion.
In addition to the 6.1-percent Gokongwei bloc disposal, Robinsons Retail issued the equivalent of 12.15 percent new shares to Dairy Farm to complete the 18.25-percent shareswap transaction.
Robinsons Retail was trading yesterday at the P86-90 range.
Money talks
• The trademark battle between the San Miguel and Lucio Tan groups has been renewed, with Ginebra San Miguel opposing Asia Brewery’s application to register Colt 45 Smooth and Strong Beer.
Even San Miguel Brewery and its marketing arm Iconic Beverages also filed an opposition to AB Heineken’s application to trademark “Manila Light,” despite the light beer having been on the market for nearly a decade now.
• China Bank is adding a 12th board seat to accommodate an incoming independent director and make the bank compliant with a Bangko Sentral requirement that one-third of the board seats be held by (friendly) outsiders.
• Michael Tolentino, a Florida-based ophthalmologist and retinal surgeon who made his drop-dead money in Wall Street as a biotech entrepreneur, is being honored next week by the American Association of the Philippines as the most outstanding Filipino-American of the year.
Tolentino is a son of another accomplished eye doctor, Felipe Tolentino, who established along with the Lopez family the Asian Eye Institute in Rockwell.
Heard through the grapevine
The bachelor representative of Albay, Joey Salceda, has filed a House bill seeking to pay monthly wage “at least an amount equivalent of a minimum wage” to any stayat-home mother who is taking care of children below 12 years as compensation for her “social reproductive work.”
The proposed minimum wage for stay-at-home moms is on top of the existing conditional-cash transfer program of P15,000 a year that a poor household with three children under 18 years old currently receive.
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com