Manual Villar, Philippines Property Tycoon

The Richest Man In Philippines

Property tycoon Manual Villar’s listed flagship Villar Land (formerly Golden MV Holdings) was in the spotlight this week when an order by the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that the company’s external auditor Punongbayan & Araullo, an affiliate of Grant Thornton, had said it doesn’t accept the 1.3-trillion-peso ($24 billion) valuation of a property the company owns and has requested for another expert appraisal. The order is linked to an investigation by the SEC that was launched after a delay by Villar Land in filing its annual audited financial statements for 2024.

In an unaudited financial report released in March, Villar Land posted net profit of close to one trillion pesos for 2024 (after providing for a 334-billion-peso deferred tax liability), an increase of 666% from the net profit of 1.5 billion pesos reported in the previous year. This bonanza was due to the company booking a massive revaluation gain of 1.3 trillion pesos, the company said, after an appraisal was conducted to ascertain the fair market value of the 366-hectare land parcel that it had purchased from Villar’s privately held companies last October for 5.2 billion pesos.

Villar Land along with Villar, its directors (including the billionaire's three children Paolo, Mark and Camille) and key executives were slapped with 12 million pesos in combined penalties by the SEC for approving and releasing the company’s unaudited financial statements in March before the valuation of the property acquired from Villar’s companies had been verified by the company’s auditor.

“There’s reason to find them administratively liable for gross negligence or bad faith [for] causing the release of public disclosure that is apparently false, inaccurate or misleading,” the SEC said in its order.

Since the land acquisition was announced in October, shares of Villar Land have had a gravity-defying run on the stock market that made it the country’s most valuable company with its market cap skyrocketing to 1.5 trillion pesos ($26 billion).

That surpassed the valuations of the Sy siblings’ SM Investments and billionaire Ramon Ang’s San Miguel, both storied companies with diverse businesses. The Philippine Stock Exchange suspended trading in the company’s shares in May for its failure to file its audited financial statement for 2024.