The Finance Department said it is weighing all possible options on how to proceed with the privatization of state-run Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. including all its assets.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said over the weekend one option was to sell the assets of the agency.
“If we privatize this, one method would be to sell all the projects… So Pagcor will probably get part of that lump sum payment and hopefully they will invest it in such a way that it will give them a string of payments in the future,” Dominguez said.
“We are going to discuss those schemes and options with them,” Dominguez said.
Dominguez said Pagcor was essentially a regulatory body, and “this is where you start getting confused… Are you a regulatory body or are you a revenue-generating organization?” he said.
He said the government was not done yet with the valuation of the assets of Pagcor because each asset should be closely scrutinized to figure out what would yield the government the most in the long run.
“By privatizing those assets, and this has been ordered by the President [in] September 2016. In fact it will be done by [fourth quarter this year]. We’ll have to start the process. There are a lot of assets and they are held in different ways, so we have to figure out the most efficient way,” Dominguez said.
Pagcor chairman and chief executive Andrea Domingo said in March she was not opposing the government’s proposal to privatize the agency and she was open to a discussion with the Finance Department about the plan.
The Duterte administration said it was open to the idea of undertaking the sale of Pagcor casinos. The sale of casinos operated by Pagcor, a wholly-owned government corporation formed in 1977 by a Marcos presidential decree, could earn billions of pesos for the government.
Pagcor posted a record gross income of P55.06 billion in 2016, up 16.6 percent from P47.21 billion in 2015, boosted by higher revenues from gaming, which include table games, electronic games and bingo operations.
Other growth drivers for the record income were fees from licensed casinos and offshore gaming. Domingo said as a result of the bullish growth of the agency’s income, it was able to increase its total contributions to nation-building by 25.45 percent.
San Miguel Corp. president Ramon Ang offered to buy Pagcor for $10 billion in 2010 under the Aquino administration, but the Finance Department said the offer was “too cheap” and said it was not in a hurry to sell.