The Long War: What the Lopez 'Ceasefire' Really Says About Power and Fatigue

On May 14, the majority withdrew the February 27 resolution that had fired Federico “Piki” Lopez as president and CEO of Lopez, Inc., the private holding company where the Lopez cousins sit. In the same statement, the majority said the move would “open a window for discussions,” allow the family to “step back,” and create a chance to look for options “least injurious” to the family, the Lopez group, and the investing public. It also said it was “open to a ceasefire” if there was a reasonable expectation of fair compromise and access to information.

In their words, the move was taken “after much reflection and prayer” because the war had already done “harm… to everybody.” They said they did not want to “push the family further into a corner” or trigger outcomes that would “destroy value for pension funds and other investors” who had nothing to do with the cousins’ quarrel.

Then came the second half of the message, the part that made the first half impossible to mistake for peace. The majority said it was still “more than ready to ramp up its efforts” to protect its legal and pecuniary interests if no fair compromise and no access to information were forthcoming. It said the damage it worries about is not only reputational but financial: agreements that, in its view, impose “undeserved financial penalties especially for the investing public.”

That is not peace language. It is pressure language dressed in a softer suit. The statement does not erase the feud. It confirms something more telling: that the feud has entered a phase where one side can pull back from a frontal assault without giving up its underlying grievance — and where the question is no longer only who can move first, but how much it costs, across an entire group of companies, to keep fighting at all.

That is why trench warfare is now the most useful frame for what the Lopez cousins are doing to each other.

In World War I, trench warfare meant soldiers dug into fixed positions on either side of a blasted strip of open ground, shelling each other from behind earthworks rather than charging across open field. The point was no longer speed or decisive breakthrough. It was endurance, position, and attrition — hold your line, wait for the other side to make a costly mistake, keep your own trench from collapsing. (For a fuller explainer on how the metaphor works in business, see this piece on trench warfare 101.)

The Lopez conflict did not begin that way.

On February 27, the majority moved like an army still in an open field. Relying on their 71 percent control of Lopez, Inc., they voted to remove Piki as president and CEO, citing loss of trust, opaque billion-peso deals, and a pattern of making decisions “like he alone owns the group.” The move was meant to be decisive. Change the commander at the top holding company and control would cascade downward to the listed firms beneath it.

Piki counterattacked in court. Within days, he obtained a writ of preliminary injunction from the Mandaluyong Regional Trial Court that blocked his removal and kept him in post at Lopez, Inc. The majority appealed to the Court of Appeals, asking it to lift what they described as an “aberrant” order that allows a minority to cling to power despite a 5–2 vote. What was meant to be a clean change of command became a stalemate.

The result is trench warfare in three dimensions. There is the legal trench, where injunctions, petitions, and appeals define the front line, and where each new filing becomes another round of shelling rather than a final judgment. There is the corporate trench, where Lopez Holdings, First Philippine Holdings, and First Gen manage board composition, regulatory compliance, and strategic decisions under the shadow of unresolved control — from independent-director resignations and no-election annual meetings to change-of-control clauses that make leadership shifts expensive. And there is the narrative trench, where each side tries to define what counts as “protecting the family” and what counts as “burning the house” — the majority invoking Kapamilya stewardship and the investing public, Piki invoking fiduciary duty to all shareholders and the confidence of global and local institutions.

To see why any of that matters, it helps to sketch the terrain the trenches cut through.

At the summit sits Lopez, Inc., the private holding company where the cousins meet. Beneath it is Lopez Holdings Corporation (LPZ), a listed holding firm in which Lopez, Inc. owns just over half of the common stock. Lopez Holdings, in turn, owns about 60 percent of First Philippine Holdings Corporation (FPH), the principal industrial holding company, and holds a majority economic interest in ABS-CBN, while Lopez, Inc. retains voting rights over the media company’s core shares. First Philippine Holdings owns roughly 68 percent of First Gen and all of its voting preferred shares, making First Gen the main platform for the group’s gas and renewables business.

Control at the top is not just symbolic. It decides who chairs the boards that set strategy, who appoints the executives that negotiate large deals, who signs off on the risk the group is willing to carry, and who carries the family name in regulatory filings and investor presentations. A fight inside Lopez, Inc., therefore, cannot be quarantined inside Lopez, Inc. Its shock waves travel down the chain.

That chain — ABS-CBN, First Gen, First Philippine Holdings (FPH), the whole inherited architecture of power and media — is the ground those trenches cut into. The longer both sides stay dug in, the more that ground turns to mud.

On one side lies the majority’s trench: Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III and the cousins that comprise the 71 percent bloc at Lopez, Inc., dug in around the language of the bylaws, the language of fiduciary alarm, and the language of public interest. In previous press releases, they insist that the Lopez, Inc. board had the right to remove an officer “with or without cause,” say they exercised that right because they no longer trust Piki, and cast themselves as defending “the family, the Lopez group, and the investing public” from opaque billion-peso deals and “self-serving poison pills” that could cost over P23 billion if he is removed. Their artillery now consists of appeals to the Court of Appeals, warnings about penalties and cross-defaults, and references to pension funds and global investors who, they argue, could be collateral damage.

On the other side is Piki’s trench: narrower in family ownership but reinforced by institutional positions and contracts. The barbed wire around it is the set of change-of-management-control clauses and bank covenants embedded in First Gen’s deals that make an abrupt leadership change both expensive and destabilizing. First Gen’s disclosures show Prime Infra can force it to sell a P62-billion hydro stake at a 25 percent discount and buy its remaining gas stake on similar terms if control shifts, while BDO Unibank’s P24.75-billion standby letters of credit have their own Change of Management Control trigger — an event of default that can ripple through other loans across the FPH group. Inside this trench, Piki points to KKR, Macquarie-GIC, and SSS as evidence that serious outside money chose to back the group with him in charge and now has a stake in his continued presence. Those are not metaphorical trenches. They are legal ditches dug into the financing.

The May 14 withdrawal fits neatly into that picture. On its face, it cancels the specific resolution firing him from Lopez, Inc. In substance, it reloads the majority’s arguments and fires them again. The same words — “poison pills,” “undeserved penalties,” “loss of confidence” — sit side by side with the offer of a ceasefire. They said any ceasefire will only hold if there is “a reasonable expectation” that Piki will “respect the 5–2 vote,” stop using court cases to “paralyze” the family’s rights as majority shareholders, and give them full, timely access to contracts and loan documents they say were kept from them. If those conditions are not met, they are “more than ready to ramp up” legal efforts — including complaints before regulators and courts — to protect both their “pecuniary interests” and those of pension funds and minority investors.

The trench lines do not move. Only one offensive action is paused.

On May 15, Piki answered from his own trench.

He called the majority’s move “a possible first step for all parties to finally resolve the issues dividing the family.” He said he hoped “the other side will back up the gesture with genuine, positive and concrete efforts leading to an amicable, fair and lasting resolution of the rift within Lopez Inc.” He added that, with this development, he hoped for “a stop of the misinformation harming the Lopez Group.”

The heart of his statement, though, was about duty and power. “In discussing solutions,” he said, he would “continue to fulfill his fiduciary duties to all shareholders in the companies of the Lopez Group” and remain “steadfast in acting as a responsible steward” of the businesses, "particularly First Philippine Holdings, Inc. (FPH) and First Gen Corporation (First Gen) — which have institutional minority shareholders with significant economic interests.” He emphasized that “it was in fulfilment of these duties” that he supported the agreements with the Prime Infra Group, and reminded readers that First Gen’s board — “which has its own governance and fiduciary obligations separate from Lopez Inc. and which includes Manuel ‘Beaver’ Lopez Jr. (cousin now in the majority), the KKR representative and all independent directors — unanimously approved these transactions.”

He then turned the “poison pill” label inside out. The controversial clauses, in his telling, are not a shield he devised to trap his board. They are an expression of how much reliance counterparties and banks have placed on him specifically: “the Prime Infra Group requested the Change of Management Control provisions in their agreements” as a vote of confidence in his leadership; BDO Unibank similarly issued its standby letters of credit “conditioned on the continued and active involvement of Piki Lopez in the FPH group.” He also used the moment to push the fight onto ABS-CBN’s terrain, saying it was “anticipated that the other side will address unresolved questions about ABS-CBN so the media firm can finally chart a path to recovery.” It was a reminder that the war is about more than hydropower clauses. It is also about who gets blamed for a wounded media institution’s struggle to rise again.

Finally, he acknowledged the length of the war. He said he remained “fully prepared for any outcome” because the cases in the Mandaluyong court and at the Securities and Exchange Commission are “proceeding in due course,” and that his focus was on leading FPH and First Gen in “delivering value through strategic projects and partnerships with reputable industry players.” It was a trench statement: no big flourish, just a promise to keep working while the shells land.

Between the trenches lies the no man’s land of modern corporate conflict.

Independent directors are there. Lopez Holdings has disclosed the resignations of two independent directors, Consuelo Garcia and Roberto L. Panlilio, in late April and early May, both citing personal reasons, but the timing means their exits are now read as part of the conflict’s fallout. The board moved its annual meeting to August 7 to give time to search for replacements and allow minority stockholders to nominate their own. On paper, it is a scheduling adjustment. In context, it looks like the cost of a war makes independent oversight harder to sustain.

Regulators are there. At FPH, the SEC has allowed the company to hold its July 27 annual stockholders’ meeting without electing a new board, on the condition that the current directors hold over until the intra-corporate dispute involving Lopez Holdings is settled or a court orders an election. It is an unusual move for a listed company, and it underlines how trench conditions can bend even well-established governance rituals.

Employees are there. In his April town hall, Piki told First Gen staff that the feud is “really a shareholder conflict,” that there is “no need” for them to take sides, and that their job is to keep managing the business “in the most professional way” they can. In Quezon City, ABS-CBN executives and directors have been telling their people that the network is not a failing enterprise, that the board rejected a shutdown proposal, and that the family majority remains committed to its mission to be “in the service of the Filipino.” None of those town halls is a neutral space. They are meetings held in the open ground between trenches.

Minority shareholders and pensioners are there too. SSS, which Piki cites as a major institutional shareholder in FPH, is not a cousin at the family table. It is the retirement money of ordinary Filipino workers, exposed to the outcome of this fight through its positions. Global funds like KKR, Macquarie, and GIC bought into First Gen and EDC under his watch; their boards now factor in court orders and cross-default risk when they evaluate their exposure. Retail investors who bought LPZ, FPH, and FGEN shares because they believed in the group’s story must now price in family risk every time a new disclosure hits the PSE website.

This is what fatigue looks like in this phase: not exhausted cousins alone, but exhausted institutions, exhausted directors, exhausted employees, and exhausted investors — all adjusting their routines around a long war that no longer resembles a single clash and has started to feel more like weather.

Share prices adjust to governance uncertainty. Boardrooms lose independent voices. Annual meetings contort around litigation. Lopez Holdings has to explain to the market why it is losing independent directors and changing meeting dates. FPH must explain why it will skip a board election at its next AGM and rely on a holdover arrangement. ABS-CBN must keep assuring regulators and audiences that the family dispute “does not affect the business operations, financial condition, and prospects” of the company, even as it fends off claims about retirees and capital infusions. Directors spend more time in legal briefings. Executives spend more time in town halls. Regulators spend more time balancing enforcement with the risk of doing harm.

That is the deeper irony of the May 14 withdrawal. It is framed as an act of care — for the family, for the investing public, for institutions that deserve better than becoming casualties in a cousins’ quarrel. And it may well be genuine in that intent. But the feud it seeks to pause has already made the terrain more difficult to hold. ABS-CBN, even in its shrunken state after the loss of its franchise, remains a symbol of media power and democratic memory, one that must now repeatedly reaffirm its mission against the noise of family conflict. First Gen and FPH are decades-long industrial bets that depend on lenders’ trust, regulators’ tolerance, and the belief that the group can keep a coherent strategy over time. Every quarter spent in the trenches eats into that assumption, not because projects stop overnight, but because attention, board time, and market confidence become stretched.

The majority invokes the Kapamilya promise, the investing public, and the family’s duty to keep ABS-CBN alive and the group clean. Piki invokes fiduciary duty to all shareholders, institutional minority stakes, and the need to keep the compounding story of FPH and First Gen uninterrupted by internal resets. Both speak the language of stewardship. And both, in waging this war, are spending down the very reserves — of trust, of governance credibility, of management attention — that make stewardship possible.

History suggests there are only a few paths out. One is breakthrough: a decisive court ruling, a binding settlement, or a shift in shareholder alignment that gives one side clear control. Another is negotiated peace: a settlement that reshapes governance, risk, and leadership in a way both sides can live with, even if neither gets to declare total victory. The bleak option is mutual damage: a war that outlasts both camps’ capacity to fight it, so that the eventual “winner” inherits weakened companies, alienated investors, and a family name diminished by the conflict it survived.

The Lopez feud has not yet chosen among those endings. But the May 14 ceasefire offer and May 15 reply, read carefully, are themselves a piece of evidence. Neither side offered it from a position of ease. They offered it because the cost of continuing — measured not in legal fees or press releases, but in the slow erosion of the ground beneath them — has become visible to everyone, including themselves.

The latest movement in the Lopez family war is, on paper, a retreat. In the trenches, it is just a shift in position.

The long war inside the Lopez empire is still about who holds power. But the “ceasefire” reveals something else: how much fatigue it now takes, across an entire group of companies and stakeholders, to keep that power fight going — and how the empire itself bears the cost of both sides claiming to defend it.

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