By LIZA REYES

ABS-CBN News

Power and infrastructure conglomerate First Philippine Holdings Corp. on Friday said it has decided to move the offering and listing date of its preferred shares sale.

The offer period was moved to April 18-24, from the original schedule of April 10-17 The listing of preferred shares on the local bourse was also set on April 30, from its original schedule of April 25.

FPHC president Elpidio Ibañez said, the delay was needed to align its financial statements in light of the adoption of new accounting standards.

"Basically the auditors asked for more time to review the re-statement of prior years 2005 and 2006, while the 2007 were already finalized, the prior years had to be restated for comparability because there were new adoptions of new accounting standards like April 12 were PNOC-EDC so we had to restate prior years' numbers and that has taken more time than expected," Ibañez said.

FPHC will sell up to 50 million preferred shares to raise up to P4.9 billion for debt servicing and venture into new investments such as solar energy.

"We have a $50 million loan with Credit Suisse-First Boston that's due next year, so we could try to buy that back in the market and we also have a $35-M loan with a fund called Darby that we can begin to prepay starting next month so we are looking at all of these options," said Ibañez.

FPHC, which owns 33.4% of power distributor Manila Electric Company (MERALCO), will offer up to 30 million preferred shares to domestic investors at P100 a piece.

A further 20 million preferred shares will be made available for the over-allotment option.

BDO Capital & Investment Corp. was tapped as the issue manager and bookrunner for the sale.