Villar Land and the business press that wouldn’t bark

The share prices of several Villar‑linked entities have exhibited extreme volatility, with sudden surges followed by collapses that erased hundreds of billions of pesos in paper value. These are not routine market fluctuations; in any mature financial system, such moves — especially when tied to allegations of market abuse — would trigger sustained scrutiny by both regulators and the press.

Yet the Philippine business media have largely ignored these seismic developments and made them merely one-day stories.

There has been no systematic effort to investigate the structure of these companies, their valuation metrics, or the trading patterns surrounding them. No running timeline of events. No attempt to connect the dots across related entities. No persistent questioning of whether the market was being driven by fundamentals or by something else.

A silent press

Instead, the press has largely remained silent once the initial headlines fade. Is it because of the fact that Villar Land, especially its biggest legacy project Villar City, has been one of the biggest advertisers, especially in the once-militant Philippine Daily Inquirer? When regulators themselves allege insider trading and manipulation involving publicly listed firms, the issue is not guilt or innocence — it is whether the press follows the trail with the same ferocity it reserves for less powerful targets. Here, it has not. Silence, in this case, functions as air cover.

Consider Villar Land itself. The company reinvented itself from a memorial‑park developer into a property giant, briefly overtaking established players such as SM Prime and Ayala Land in market value. In 2024, it publicly disclosed unaudited figures suggesting assets of about P1.3 trillion and nearly P1 trillion in net income, largely driven by a staggering revaluation of land. Those numbers helped propel its stock market capitalization to roughly P1.6 trillion at its peak, briefly making it appear to be the country’s most valuable property company.

When audited statements later showed total assets of only around P35.7 billion and net income closer to P1.4 billion to P1.5 billion, the discrepancy was enormous. By November 2025, after a months‑long trading halt and the eventual lifting of the suspension, Villar Land’s share price plunged by roughly 70 percent to 80 percent in a matter of days, wiping out over P1 trillion in paper value. The SEC has alleged in its complaint that Villar Land engaged in fraud, price manipulation, and misleading disclosures; Manny Villar, for his part, publicly rejects the accusations as baseless and insists the company complied with existing rules.

This should be the investigative business story of the decade, on the level of colossal corporate meltdowns as the Banco Filipino banking and property conglomerate in the closing years of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s regime and the notorious BW Resources owned by former president Joseph Estrada’s friend. Instead, it has been treated mostly as a sequence of isolated “developments”: a rebranding here, a revaluation there, a price spike, a suspension notice, a resumption of trading, then an SEC complaint — each reported as a one‑day item, without the cumulative context that would let the investing public see the pattern.

A functioning business press would approach such a case differently. It would map the corporate structure: how various listed and unlisted entities relate to one another, how assets are transferred, how valuations are determined. It would analyze financial statements, not just summarize them. It would track stock performance against underlying fundamentals, identifying divergences that demand explanation.

Martial law

Take it from me: much of my journalism career has really been as a business and economic reporter at Business Day. Even during martial law, business journalists went fiercely against corporate anomalies — although off-limits, of course, for a particular report were the shenanigans of companies linked to his paper’s owners. An arrangement, though, as to feed the story a reporter couldn’t report to the other newspapers.

If a company’s share price rises dramatically, the press would ask why. If it falls just as dramatically, it would ask again. If regulators file a complaint, it would follow the process, report each significant development, and hold both companies and regulators accountable for their responses. That is what business journalism is supposed to do.

Instead, what we have is a system shaped by incentives that discourage exactly this kind of reporting. This pattern did not begin with Villar Land. It was already visible in earlier episodes involving Villar‑linked firms — episodes that, in hindsight, look like dress rehearsals for today’s crisis. One of those was the 2021 initial public offering (IPO) of Medilines Distributors Inc., associated with the brother of Manny Villar. The IPO was marketed aggressively and billed as the country’s first “pure‑play health care” listing, a timely bet on Covid-19 pandemic‑era demand backed by confident growth projections. In reality, Medilines is a distributor of high‑end medical equipment supplying both private and public hospitals and partnering with global brands. It sits at the junction of public health and public money, helping determine what technology reaches provincial hospitals and how scarce public budgets are spent.

Precisely for that reason, it should have been one of the most closely watched listings on the exchange. Yet coverage treated it like any other IPO. The Philippine Stock Exchange cleared the offer in October 2021, the shares were priced at P2.30 — just below the indicated ceiling of P2.45 — raising close to P1.9 billion and business pages dutifully reported the offer price, use of proceeds, and “record” earnings potential.

On its Dec. 7, 2021 debut, Medilines’ shares crashed in a turbulent first day of trading, at one point falling by more than 30 percent below the IPO price. In the years that followed, the company remained profitable on paper, but the stock slid to a fraction of its offer price, leaving investors suffering losses of around 80 to 90 percent while the firm continued to depend heavily on government and hospital spending.

Should have asked why

A vigilant business press would have asked why the market rejected the narrative so decisively, what that meant for health‑sector procurement risks and, most importantly, who actually benefited from the listing. Instead, for most media outlets, the story effectively stopped on day one.

This is a defining failure of Philippine business journalism today: it reports beginnings, not outcomes. It amplifies claims, but rarely tests them. It treats corporate narratives as events, not as hypotheses to be verified over time.

One explanation is that media organizations are financially constrained. Advertising revenues are concentrated among large corporations — the very subjects of coverage. This creates an implicit boundary. Critical reporting risks commercial repercussions. Worse, social media have cornered advertising revenues, as much as 50 percent, according to some estimates.

Access reinforces this dynamic. Corporate briefings, exclusive interviews, and early disclosures are valuable commodities in a competitive media environment. Maintaining access often requires restraint. Questions are calibrated. Follow‑ups are limited. Stories that might provoke confrontation are deprioritized.

Over time, this produces a subtle but pervasive shift. Journalism becomes less about investigation and more about transmission. Reporters relay information provided by companies rather than interrogating it. The newspapers’ corporate officials hate being called by executives of a company given bad press.

This has crucial consequences for the market. Investors rely on publicly available information to make decisions. When that information is incomplete or overly shaped by corporate narratives, risks are mispriced. Retail investors, i.e. small people like you and me, are vulnerable. They see the headlines at the moment of maximum optimism — IPO launches, expansion plans, “record” earnings — but not the follow‑through that would allow them to judge whether those narratives held up over time.

The Villar Land saga illustrates this risk perfectly. When a company’s market value is driven to P1.6 trillion on the back of an extraordinary land revaluation, then collapses to a fraction of that, when trading suspensions are imposed and lifted, when a criminal complaint is finally filed alleging fraud and market abuse, the absence of sustained reporting leaves a vacuum. In that vacuum, speculation thrives, and accountability recedes.

A well‑functioning market requires not just disclosure, but scrutiny. It requires independent verification, contextual analysis, and institutional memory. Without these, the market becomes less efficient, less transparent, and more prone to distortion.

The Philippine economy, as it grows more complex, needs this kind of scrutiny more than ever. Corporate structures are increasingly layered. Financial instruments are more sophisticated. The intersection of business and politics has become more pronounced. Big businessmen have been rushing to have representatives in Congress, especially in the Senate, making our democracy more and more an oligarchy. Or wasn’t it always so before, in different forms?

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Villar Land and the business press that wouldn’t bark
Source: Breaking News PH