Bong Tan’s big bang

The hardly-traded MRC Allied stock started the new year with a bang.

The sleeper stock closed Tuesday at P0.67, racheting to bump the 50-percent price ceiling on Monday from the end-2009 close of P0.36, amid apparently credible market chatter that Lucio “Bong” Tan Jr.—the eldest son of the tobacco, beer, airline, real estate, hotel, and banking taipan—was buying into the real estate company to transform the penny stock firm into a power plant venture.

According to the grapevine, Bong Tan will fold into MRC Allied a Northern Luzon power project that he and his foreign partners are now close to acquiring for P3.3 billion.

After the fold-in, the young Tan will tap banking giant HSBC for a P2-billion to P3-billion bond float to fund the construction of a methane gas power plant in his father’s sprawling Foremost Farms in upland Rizal province, a venture that will also enable the piggery to obtain international carbon credits.

The MRC-power plant venture is apparently being undertaken by Tan outside of his father’s sprawling empire, a Philippine version of what Hong Kong’s Richard Li did to assert his identity outside of dad’s, and the territory’s richest man, Li Ka Shing

Source: COCKTALES by Victor C Agustin