Explainer: Who Really Owns Lopez Inc.—and Why the 29% Cousin Is in Charge

Federico “Piki” Lopez runs the family’s mothership with less than a third of its shares. On paper, his branch controls 29.17 percent of Lopez Inc. In practice, he sits at the head of the table that ultimately steers First Gen, Energy Development Corp. (EDC), Rockwell Land and what is left of ABS‑CBN’s broadcast empire—even after a 71 percent family majority has already voted to fire him. Today, the only thing keeping him in that chair is a court order.

Lopez Inc. is not a public company. It is a private holding and investment vehicle at the very top of the Lopez corporate tree—what lawyers call the “ultimate parent.” Lopez Inc. is the majority owner of Lopez Holdings Corporation, once known as Benpres. In turn, Lopez Holdings holds big stakes in First Philippine Holdings (FPH) and ABS‑CBN. FPH owns control of First Gen and EDC and—after a series of buyouts—around 87 percent of Rockwell Land. However many layers you pass through, control of Lopez Inc is control of the group’s remaining crown jewels. 

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For decades, that control rested with an older generation: brothers Geny, Oscar, Manolo and their sister Presy, who rotated top roles in the holding firms and operating companies. Over time, the presidency of Lopez Inc. itself migrated to the next or the third generation. First came the media cousin, Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III, who took over as ABS-CBN president in 1993 and was the public face of the broadcast arm after his father, Geny, passed. Then came the quieter power cousin, Piki, who built a track record in the group’s energy and infrastructure bets, which his father Oscar oversaw. The real family drama is not just that a 29 percent cousin now leads the mothership. It is that the 71 percent majority has decided it no longer trusts him—and that the rules on who should lead were never written down. 

The latest general information sheet filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows Lopez Inc as a tightly held, four‑cornered family company. All of its 46,389,352 common shares are owned by just four corporate vehicles, each corresponding to a branch of the family. Croslo Holdings Corp. holds 13,532,434 common shares, or 29.17 percent, and is associated with the Oscar branch. Mantes Corp. holds the same number of shares and the same 29.17 percent for the Manolo branch. Créme Investment Corp. holds 11,911,526 shares, or 25.68 percent, for the Geny branch. Presta Holdings Co. Inc. holds 7,412,858 shares, or 15.98%, for the Presentacion “Presy” branch. 

On the Lopez Inc. board, these percentages translate into people. Croslo is represented by brothers Federico “Piki” Lopez, the president, and Benjamin “Jay” Lopez, a senior executive vice president. Mantes sends cousins Miguel Ernesto “Mikey” Lopez, the treasurer, and Martin “Mark” Lopez. Créme is represented by Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez III and his younger brother Rafael “Raffy” Lopez, who now serves as Lopez Inc chair. Presta, the smallest block, has Maria Eugenia “Ginny” Psinakis Brown at the table. This is the seven‑person board that met on February 27 and, according to three branches representing 71 percent of Lopez Inc’s equity, voted 5–2 to remove Piki as president and CEO. Only Piki and his brother Jay opposed the move. Everyone else—Mantes, Créme and Presta—voted to push him out and to install Raffy as the new president. In branch terms, it was Oscar’s 29.17 percent versus the combined 70.83 percent of Manolo, Geny and Presy.  

Lopez Inc. predates the listed holding company everyone knows as Lopez Holdings. It was created as a private holding and investment entity to own and control the family’s assets—an extra layer of protection above the operating companies. In 1993 the Lopezes incorporated Benpres Holdings, now Lopez Holdings Corporation, as the public face for their stakes in key sectors: broadcasting and cable (ABS‑CBN), power generation and distribution (FPH, Meralco), telecoms (BayanTel), toll roads and other utilities. The logic was simple. If a “Pac‑Man” buyer, a hostile creditor, or a hostile government went after one company—Meralco, ABS‑CBN, a bank—the rest of the group would still be anchored in the upstream holding. When martial law stripped ABS‑CBN and Meralco, when the Meralco wars flared again under regulators allied with other tycoons, that extra layer mattered. Lopez Inc, sitting above Lopez Holdings and FPH, was the firewall meant to keep the family’s ownership intact even if one fort fell.

In the 2020s, the family’s assets have become more concentrated. Lopez Holdings remains the listed holding, but it now revolves around a smaller set of core bets. FPH, which Lopez Holdings controls, is the main vehicle for power and infrastructure: it owns a controlling stake in First Gen, which in turn holds 100 percent of geothermal firm EDC and major gas, hydro and renewable assets; it also controls Rockwell Land, the developer behind Rockwell Center and other high‑end condominiums and residential developments. Lopez Holdings also retains interests in ABS‑CBN, though the network has shrunk after its free‑to‑air shutdown. Through these layers, Lopez Inc ultimately steers First Gen, EDC, Rockwell and ABS‑CBN—even if its name never appears on a stock‑market ticker.

For much of the post‑Marcos era, the people atop these layers were the second‑generation Lopezes. Geny Lopez Jr. reclaimed ABS‑CBN and turned it into the country’s dominant network. He also led Benpres as the group’s public face. After Geny’s death in 1999, his brother Oscar chaired First Philippine Holdings, repositioning the group around power and toll roads and later driving its push into natural gas and renewable energy. After Geny died in 1999, Oscar took over as the family patriarch and business leader. Their younger brother Manolo carried the burden of Meralco and its politics, while their sister Presy held roles at Lopez Inc and in the family’s U.S.‑based operations. 

As they aged, roles migrated to the third generation. Gabby became ABS‑CBN president and CEO in 1993, led its expansion into cable, regional channels and digital, and eventually became chairman. By 2018, the network had begun formalizing succession: the board elected Mark Lopez, from the Mantes branch, as chair, and shifted Gabby into a chairman emeritus role. Two years later, after ABS‑CBN lost its broadcast franchise and former President Rodrigo Duterte publicly celebrated the “dismantling of oligarchs,” Gabby resigned as chairman emeritus and as director of ABS‑CBN, ABS‑CBN Holdings, First Philippine Holdings, First Gen and Rockwell Land, citing “personal reasons.” Those resignations lowered the media cousin’s formal profile at the very moment the family’s broadcast arm was under maximum political heat. 

They also cleared space for the energy cousin. 

Piki had become CEO of First Gen in 1998 and CEO of First Philippine Holdings by 2010. In 2012, he took over as EDC chair. In 2020, he was elected chairman and CEO of Lopez Holdings Corporation, atop his existing roles in FPH and First Gen. Recent filings and news reports now routinely identify him as president of Lopez Inc as well—the private apex above the listed tent.

In that light, his position at Lopez Inc was less a hostile climb than a consolidation: the cousin who already ran the energy and holding platforms moved up to the ultimate parent, just as the cousin who had embodied ABS‑CBN receded. People familiar with the family’s deliberations say this made political sense: in the Duterte era, having the “power cousin” front the group and the “media cousin” quietly step back was a way to reduce the political target on ABS‑CBN while keeping the group’s financing and power bets stable. 

Earlier, the top seat at Lopez Inc did not belong to any one cousin. In various periods, elders like Oscar and Manolo—and their sister Presy—took turns in key roles across the holding structure. Public records are clearer for Benpres/Lopez Holdings and FPH than for Lopez Inc itself, but they show Oscar as long‑time chairman of FPH and later of Lopez Holdings, and Manolo as chairman and CEO of Meralco. Within that framework, Lopez Inc functioned as a family council in corporate form: a place where the four second‑generation branches were represented and could align on strategy. That generational buffer is gone. Geny died in 1999, Presy in 2017, Oscar in 2023, and Manolo in 2023. The presidency of Lopez Inc is now firmly a third‑generation affair, and the fight over who should hold it is being waged among cousins, not siblings. 

In March 2026, that cousin‑to‑cousin fight came out into the open. According to a statement issued through their lawyer, three branches—Mantes, Créme and Presta—holding a combined 71 percent of Lopez Inc’s shares voted with their representatives on the board to remove Piki as president and CEO “for cause and for loss of trust and confidence.” The board tally was 5–2. Only Piki and his brother Jay voted to keep him in place; everyone else supported his ouster. The statement points to Lopez Inc’s by‑laws, which allow the board to remove any officer “even without cause” by majority vote, and says the majority intends to pursue legal action against Piki and his allies for “questionable transactions involving billions of pesos” and for “betraying fiduciary obligations” to the holding company. In their view, this was not just a personality clash. It was a governance breach.

Within days, the fight moved to court. On March 26, a Mandaluyong regional trial court issued a preliminary injunction barring the implementation of the February 27 board resolutions, effectively freezing the status quo and keeping Piki as Lopez Inc president while the case is being heard. The 71 percent bloc has since asked the court to lift that injunction, arguing that it improperly blocks the will of the majority owners and the operation of the by‑laws. For now, Lopez Inc. has a president that most of its owners say they no longer trust, and a court that says he stays until it decides otherwise.

Underpinning the majority’s narrative of lost trust is a claim about information: that Lopez Inc’s board was not adequately briefed on billion‑peso deals involving companies it ultimately controls. One detail appears repeatedly in their statements and in press accounts: a major transaction that, they say, was presented under “other matters” on the agenda—after it was effectively a done deal. Reports and business columns point to the sale of 60 percent of First Gen’s gas business to Enrique Razon Jr.’s Prime Infrastructure for at least P50 billion as one of those deals. Razon, born in 1960 and educated at La Salle Greenhills and De La Salle University, is only a year older than Piki, who was born in August 1961 and finished grade school and high school within the same La Salle Greenhills system before heading to the University of Pennsylvania. In April 2026, they are 66 and 64, peers from the same Lasallian generation shaping each other’s core businesses. 

Under that agreement, Razon-led Prime Infra acquires a 60 percent stake in the Lopez group’s gas complex in Batangas—the Santa Rita, San Lorenzo, San Gabriel and Avion plants, plus the proposed Santa Maria plant and an LNG terminal—while First Gen keeps 40 percent, cedes operational control and receives a massive cash infusion. For a family whose fortunes have been tied to those gas plants since the 1990s, that is not a routine board footnote. It determines who controls assets described by regulators as indispensable to the country’s power security, and it generates the cash that underpins First Gen’s new bets in pumped‑storage hydropower and geothermal expansion. To have such a deal walk into a Lopez Inc meeting under “other matters,” and only after it has been negotiated, is precisely the sort of thing the 71 percent bloc now describes as “opaque management” and a reason to withdraw trust.

The gas sale is not the only flashpoint. The Lopez Inc’s board had also been divided over a proposed P2‑billion capital injection into ABS‑CBN. According to that account, Piki and Jay opposed using Lopez Inc. reserve funds to recapitalize the struggling network, citing unresolved audit issues that they said needed to be clarified first. ABS‑CBN has called such claims “unfounded,” but the episode underscores how disagreements over who gets to see which numbers—and when—have hardened into questions of loyalty itself.

Behind all this is a simpler structural problem. Unlike some business clans, the Lopez family does not appear to have a binding family constitution that sets out how top roles at Lopez Inc are allocated among branches, or how and when they rotate. Past attempts at codifying such rules have reportedly been discussed but never yielded a document that all four branches have clearly signed onto. For as long as the second‑generation elders were alive, that did not seem urgent. If Geny and Oscar wanted Gabby to run ABS‑CBN and Benpres, or if Oscar and Manolo wanted Piki to manage FPH and First Gen, they could simply agree and everyone else would fall in line. When Duterte’s hostility to ABS‑CBN escalated, the cousins could also informally agree that it was safer for the “power cousin” to front the family, while the “media cousin” stepped back from formal roles. 

Once that generation passed, however, unwritten understandings became contestable. In the present dispute, the 71 percent bloc now leans on the math and the by‑laws: three branches together own 70.83 percent, they hold five of seven board seats, and they have voted to fire the president. The 29 percent president, in turn, leans on process, corporate law and his own track record: he argues that as head of listed companies he cannot casually brief relatives on market‑moving deals without risking insider‑trading allegations, and that sensitive audits and information‑sharing need to be handled under non‑disclosure agreements. What would have been mediated quietly around a dining table is now being argued in court filings, captured in blow-by-blow news reports.  

It is easy to see this as a straight arithmetic fight: 29 percent versus 71 percent, a minority cousin clinging to a chair that the majority wants back. But that ignores why the 29 percent was there to begin with. In the early 2000s, when Meralco and the Lopez group were facing a crusade from pension fund chief Winston Garcia over allegedly overpriced power contracts, it was Piki who engaged critics on the numbers and quietly renegotiated terms to defuse the issue, rather than turning it into a spectacle. Later, when Benpres’ debt ballooned after the EDC acquisition and the telecom and toll‑road bets soured, he led asset sales and refinancings that kept the group out of court‑supervised rehabilitation. Those episodes created a reputation. In the eyes of many in his parents’ generation, he was the cousin who could sit across from regulators and bankers with a thick sheaf of contracts, take punches, and still persuade them that the group would pay its debts and keep the lights on. In a country where politics can turn on a single franchise vote, having that kind of operator at the top of your holding company was not a luxury. It was survival. 

Strip away the legalese, and the fight over Lopez Inc boils down to three questions. First, how should leadership in a family holding be determined? Lopez Inc. shows that there is no automatic rule that the biggest shareholder must be president. The elders were comfortable letting a smaller‑percentage branch lead if they believed that cousin could best protect the whole. The problem is what to do when the elders are gone and another branch decides that bet has gone wrong. Second, what level of information does a family holding company deserve about deals that technically happen one layer down, in a listed subsidiary? When a P50‑billion sale of core gas assets is agreed, or a multibillion‑peso hydro investment is pursued, the law cares about timely disclosure to the market. The 71 percent bloc now insists that, as ultimate owners, they should also be briefed early enough to influence those decisions—not told about them under “other matters” once they are effectively done. Third, what exactly is Lopez Inc. for in this generation? It was built as a shield against confiscation and “Pac‑Man” raids. In that sense, it has worked: even after selling Meralco, losing ABS‑CBN’s franchise and taking on heavy debt, the family still holds control of First Gen, EDC, Rockwell and a smaller ABS‑CBN through it. But a shield is only as strong as the agreement behind it. A holding company designed to keep outsiders at bay now finds itself paralyzed by an insider war. 

The 29 percent cousin’s gamble is built on timing. Piki is betting that as the Luzon grid fills up with solar and wind, and as the group’s long‑duration hydro assets and geothermal projects come online, the family will eventually value continuity over revolt. He is banking on the idea that solid financial returns will pave the way for a reconciliation of interests. Simply put: the pragmatism of profit often outlasts the heat of a boardroom battle. The 71 percent majority’s bet is that they can change captains now, reassert branch control over the mothership and still harvest those returns with someone else at the helm. 

Either way, the rest of us are getting a rare education. We are watching, in real time, how a Filipino business dynasty that once built extra corporate layers to defend itself from government now finds that its biggest vulnerability is not Malacañang or a “Pac‑Man” competitor, but the absence of a modern constitution inside its own house.