Benpres Holding Corp., the publicly listed holding firm of the Lopez family, is buying preferred shares of affiliate First Philippine Holdings Corp. (FPHC) as part of its cash management program.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, Benpres said its board has approved a plan to purchase 500,000 preferred shares of FPHC.

"It's just to improve yields on approximately P50 million of our cash. We hold cash from several asset sales since last year. Preferred shares have zero voting rights, just fixed dividend yield," a Benpres public relations officer told reporters in a text message.

To date, Benpres has acquired 178,000 FPHC preferred shares at an average price of P95 each, below the issue price of P100 per share. The FPHC shares pay a fixed dividend rate of 8.7231 percent per annum.

On Tuesday, FPHC closed down P0.50 at P28 per share while Benpres fell P0.10 to P1.84 apiece.

abs-cbnNEWS.com is the online news arm of ABS-CBN. The firms Benpres, First Philippine Holdings, and ABS-CBN are part of the Lopez Group of Companies