Stop pulling our leg

Let’s all hope that the Securities and Exchange Commission will not buy the crap that GSIS, through its chief lawyer, has been peddling.

Last March, GSIS president Winston Garcia revealed that there was an offer to acquire the GSIS and SM group respective stakes in Equitable PCI Bank, new that sent the bank’s share prices soaring. Because of the announcement of an unknown buyer, stock prices of EPCIB soared to P82 last March 24 from a trading range of about P62.50 on March 7. Last April 20, it ended at P71.50 from the March 24 closing of P82 per share or down by P10.50 per share.

The announcement was obviously resorted to as a desperate attempt to drum up interest in the bidding for GSIS‚12-percent stake in EPCIB. After all, GSIS had to reschedule the auction for its EPCIB stake to May 8 after no party indicated interest to participate.

The SEC however has had enough. It recently required Garcia to reveal the identity of these mysterious offerors, apparently to protect the investing the public from baseless pronouncements.

Now here comes GSIS claiming that the mysterious offer actually came from the group of retail tycoon Henry Sy (SM group which owns 34 percent of EPCIB) which has offered to acquire government financial institution’s stake in EPCIB for as much as P95 per share.

According to GSIS chief lawyer Leighton Siazon, BDO secretly tendered a formal offer to GSIS to acquire its EPCIB holdings at P92 per share which was later increased to P95 per share. BDO made the offer, he said, a few week before its public offer to merge with EPCIB.

If Siazon and his principal Garcia were referring to a draft term sheet prepared by BDO president Nestor Tan (without the conforme of the Sys) regarding the possible exchange of GSIS‚ EPCIB stake with shares held by the Sys in SM Prime Holdings, e-mailed to Garcia in November last year and immediately rejected by the GSIS president, then these GSIS officials are definitely duping the SEC and the investing public.

The draft term sheet which did not even have the imprimatur of the Sys cannot be the "formal offer" Garcia was referring to in his March 24 pronouncement of an alleged mysterious buyer.

BDO in January again offered a share swap of 1.6 BDO shares for every one EPCIB share under a proposal to merge BDO and EPCIB, a proposal which was also rejected, nay, which was not even considered by the board. The proposal would translate to P56 worth of BDO share for every EPCIB share compared to the prevailing market price of P63 to P65 per share at that time.

BDO, in a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange yesterday, said it has not made any formal offer to purchase the shareholdings of GSIS in EPCIB whether at P92 or P95 per share before BDO made its offer of merge of equals with EPCIB. It added that BDO has likewise not received any formal offer to buy its own shareholdings in EPCIB for that price range

For its part, EPCIB says it has no knowledge of any offer to acquire GSIS or the Sy group’s stake in the bank.

Garcia and his cohorts are obviously muddling the issue, if not confusing the SEC and the public. It’s clear that in March, he announced that there was a formal offer to acquire GSIS and the SM group’s stake.

What the SM group received was an expression of interest on the part of an unknown client of Siguion Reyna law office, which was not perceived as a serious offer because of the outrageous conditionalities being demanded by the alleged offeror on the part of the SM group. Of course the Sys are curious to know who Siguion Reyna is representing. I doubt it though if SEC can legally compel the law firm to disclose its client.

As for GSIS and Garcia, their responsibility to the investing public to disclose the "mysterious buyer‚ that they were referring to is not over. If they were really referring to the "dead SM group draft proposal" made last November, then why make the public believe that there was a serious formal offer when the proposal has already been rejected?

Let’s hope that the SEC will not allow Garcia to go scot-free this time. This esteemed institution should not allow Garcia to make a mockery of it.

A new Pinoy star emerges

Another "gawang Pinoy" is making it big in the international scene.

One of the highlights of the 3GSM World Conference in Barcelona, Spain last February was the star-studded unveiling of a new mobile entertainment service that features daily mobile entertainment content co-produced directly with celebrity and artist partners called BlogStar Mobile.

Developed by BlogStar LLC, a global company whose technology arm is led by 2004 Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Myla Villanueva, BlogStar Mobile produces celebrity driven mobile entertainment allowing high-profile celebrities to create and distribute an array of mobile entertainment including text, picture, audio, video, and community features, direct to a global fan-base.

The company is composed of a world-class team with bases in Los Angeles and Manila, the latter being the center of technical development and operations.

Villanueva, who is BlogStar’s chief technology and strategy officer, has inked a partnership with famed Hollywood producer Ted Field, who is responsible for over 50 major motion pictures generating worldwide box office gross receipts of over $5.5 billion, including The Last Samurai, Runaway Bride, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror, Jumanji, Pitch Black, Mr. Holland’s Opus, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Three Men and a Baby, Cocktail, and more.

Field also co-founded Interscope Records, which signed up artists such as Eminem, No Doubt, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Nine Inch Nails, Tupac, The Wallflowers, Smash Mouth and more. BlogStar CEO Keith Yokomoto and COO Randy Levy have also worked with major talent such as the Rolling Stones, No Dobut, Metaliica, Backsteet Boys, Korn, and many others when they co-founded a company, ARTIST direct.

BlogStar offers a unique mobile blogging platform designed to take blogging from the Internet to the mobile world.

Villanueva is no stranger to pioneering mobile applications development, having been co-founder of Wolfpac & Meridian, two companies now under Smart Communications.

While local telecommunication firms have already popularized the concept of SMS-driven fan interaction between local celebrities and their fans, BlogStar takes it a step further, creating a revolutionary new entertainment product, celebrity mobile blogging, allowing high-profile celebrities to create and distribute an array of mobile entertainment (text, picture, audio, and video-based) direct to their global fan-bases through the Internet and Web, WAP and 2G, 2.5G and 3G Mobile.

BlogStar has already made agreements with high-profile celebrities such as Jessica Simpson, Ashlee Simpson, Wesley Snipes, Caprice, Juliette Lewis, Bam Margera, Kelly Slater, David Arquette, Nick Lachey, The Game, Alicia Silverstone, Nicky Hilton, Jack Osbourne, Tom Green, West Coast Customs, Ryan Cabrera, among others. As BlogStar expands, it will target key international celebrities and partnerships to make the BlogStar content relevant in each locality it is offered.

BlogStar is currently available to mobile subscribers in the US through Sprint, Cingular, and T-Mobile; in the UK through Vodafone, Orange, 3, T-Mobile, Virgin, and 2; and in Spain through MoviStar, Amena, and Vodafone. BlogStar will be available shortly in other European and Asian countries. It expects rapid acceleration and growth aiming toward forming international strategic alliances and expanding its global reach throughout 2006.

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