Saturday, July 12, 2008 [ philstar.com ]
The National Government (NG) has deferred indefinitely its plan to sell bulk of the 120-hectare Food Terminals Inc. (FTI) property in Taguig, Finance Secretary Margarito Teves said yesterday.
Originally, the plan was to sell the property this year as part of the programmed P30 billion proceeds from privatization.
“We are saying the market is soft. It might be prudent for us to consider other alternatives,” Teves told reporters yesterday.
Teves said there are alternative sources of funds such as expected proceeds from the sale of Petron Corp. and the Philippine National Oil Company-Exploration Corp.
The government has yet to determine the price of the initial area to be sold but the whole property was last valued at P15 billion. The government is still determining the present value of the property.
FTI, an agro-industrial commercial estate in Taguig, was originally built to be a food processing and consolidation center for agricultural products. It houses more than 300 small-to-medium scale companies engaged in different industries such as manufacturing, garments and electronics.
However, Teves said the government does not have formal approvals yet for the sale of Petron.
“We still have to go through the reserved price. It should be better than what we have seen from the Ashmore-Aramco deal,” Teves said.
Saudi Aramco sold its 40 percent stake in Petron to the Ashmore Group for $550 million last March.
Previously, the government was looking into selling the FTI property in three installments but the government has decided it would be more practical to just embark on a one-time sale of a substantial part of the area or roughly 100 hectares to attract more bidders.
The Finance department has set a target of P30 billion from privatization for 2008 or one third of the P90.6 billion generated last year. Aside from FTI sale, the P30 billion includes expected revenues from the sale of the government’s real estate properties in Japan.
It also includes the P8.9 billion which the government generated from the sale of its stake in power distributor Manila Electric Co. early this year.
The government has been stepping up efforts to boost state coffers but the privatization of state-owned assets has become the major source of revenues amid shortfalls in tax collections.
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