ABS-CBN clarified PCC has not completed its review of broadband business sale to PLDT

ABS-CBN [ABS 5.09, down 12.2%; 1448% avgVol] [link] clarified that the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) has not completed its review of the proposed P6.8 billion sale of Sky Cable’s broadband business to PLDT [TEL 1284.00, up 0.6%; 110% avgVol]. ABS was forced to clarify after reporting from Bilyonaryo (citing “a Babbler”) that the PCC had “given its approval for PLDT’s 100 percent buyout of ABS-CBN’s Sky Cable.” In a related clarification, TEL also said that the PCC has yet to complete its review, but added that once PCC approval is obtained, ABS will still need to “work on the other closing conditions”, which include “the termination or cessation of Sky’s pay TV and cable businesses.”

 

MB bottom-line: You really need to squint, but I don’t think that the Bilyonaryo reporting and the clarifications are necessarily in direct conflict or mutually exclusive. The reporting could be inaccurate or premature in terms of the kind of official approval communication from the PCC that would be required to satisfy one of ABS’s conditions to the deal. It’s possible that the source in the article is talking about what the PCC intends to do based on its preliminary findings, or that there’s been some kind of backchanneling to give the parties a heads-up that the final PCC report will be favorable. It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in a transaction that needed to go through PCC review, but I found the agency to be an absolute black hole of communication. We didn’t get any status updates. No back-and-forth chatter. We threw the data over the fence and waited. Things might have changed since I last dealt with a PCC transaction, but my experience with the group made me respect the PCC’s integrity and process-oriented approach. 

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