Every month, across Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces, about 8.2 million Meralco bills arrive. They land in email inboxes, get tucked under doors, show up in apps. Most people look at the total, feel the familiar sting, and move on. Very few read the line items. Almost nobody thinks about who, exactly, is on the other end of that payment — how they got there, who put them there, and what they have been building all along while the rest of us have been busy being their customers.
Meralco is 122 years old. It has been owned by Americans, by one of the Philippines’ most powerful families, by a dictator’s brother-in-law, by a Spanish energy company, by government pension funds, by a food conglomerate that makes beer, and by the current coalition of tycoons who run it today. It has survived a forced sale under martial law, one of the longest corporate boardroom battles in Philippine history, and a national energy reform law that was supposed to put a hard ceiling on what it could become.
It outlasted all of them. And it is still growing.
This is the story of how Meralco became what it is — not the electricity company your bill says you are paying, but something considerably larger and more complicated than that.
Act One: It started with trams, not electricity (1891–1903)
Before Meralco existed, there was La Electricista, a small Spanish-era company that had been running Manila’s first power plant since 1894, on what is now Hidalgo Street in Quiapo. It was not glamorous infrastructure. It was a central generator supplying electricity to a few thousand customers in a colonial city that still ran largely on candlelight. By 1895, La Electricista had switched on Manila’s first electric streetlights. By 1903, it had about 3,000 paying customers.
But the bigger story was happening elsewhere in the city, in the muddy, chaotic streets that Manila’s horse-drawn tramways were struggling to manage. The American colonial government, freshly installed and intent on modernizing what it had taken, opened a bidding process in 1902 for a company to electrify the city’s transportation. An entrepreneur from Detroit named Charles Swift was the only one who showed up.
On March 24, 1903, Swift was granted the franchise to build and operate Manila’s electric street railways and, almost as a secondary provision, to supply the city with electric light and power. His company was called the Manila Electric Railroad and Light Company, which is where the name Meralco comes from. The trams were the main event. Electricity for homes and offices was the bonus feature.
This matters because it tells you something about how Meralco grew. It did not start with a vision of powering a nation. It started with a contract to run trams. The electricity business expanded alongside the city, absorbing competitors, building infrastructure, and deepening its franchise year by year, almost by gravitational force. In 1904, Meralco acquired La Electricista outright, absorbing the oldest electric infrastructure in Manila in the process.
Think of it the way Jollibee started as an ice cream parlor. The thing they became famous for was not the thing they started with.
For the next several decades, Meralco and Manila grew together. The company built its own power plants, strung wires across an expanding urban landscape, and made itself so essential to the daily function of the city that by 1969 — 6 decades after Swift got his franchise — Meralco became the first company in Philippine history to reach P1 billion in capitalization. It was an American-owned company, managed by Americans, serving a city that had grown from a colonial port into a national capital.
Then, in 1961, a Filipino family decided it was time for the country to own its own electricity.
Act two: The crown jewel and the family that wore it (1961–1972)
Eugenio “Ening” Lopez Sr. was, by the early 1960s, one of the most consequential figures in Philippine business and politics. His family already controlled ABS-CBN, the country’s dominant broadcasting network. Now he led a group of Filipino investors in negotiating the buyout of General Public Utilities, the American holding company that controlled Meralco’s shares.
The acquisition was celebrated at the time as the first major American enterprise in the Philippines to be “Filipinized,” a nationalistic milestone that went well beyond the transaction itself. The Lopezes had not merely bought a company. They had reclaimed a piece of national infrastructure from foreign hands, and the symbolic weight of that act was understood by everyone.
With ABS-CBN and Meralco, the Lopez family now controlled the two most powerful utilities in any modern society: the airwaves and the electricity grid. Between what people watched and what powered their homes, the Lopez name was everywhere in Filipino life without most people necessarily seeing it.
For about a decade, the combination worked. Meralco under the Lopezes expanded its service territory, invested in its network, and became, in the words of the company’s own history, the cornerstone of Metro Manila’s economic life. Manuel Lopez, one of Eugenio Sr.’s sons, would go on to run the company for more than 3 decades, becoming so identified with it that his departure in 2012 was treated almost as the end of an era rather than a retirement.
There was, meanwhile, a political dimension to the Lopez family that made their relationship with Marcos more layered than it might first appear. Eugenio Sr.’s younger brother, Fernando (nickname: Nanding), had served as Marcos’s Vice President — elected alongside him in 1965 and again in 1969, making Fernando one of only 2 vice presidents in Philippine history to serve two non-consecutive terms. The Lopez brothers and the Marcos family had, in other words, been genuine political allies. Fernando ran the Department of Agriculture. His name was on the ballot next to Marcos’s.
The break, when it came, was swift and irreversible. After the 1969 elections, Fernando and Marcos had a falling out with what historians have described as explosive political consequences. Fernando eventually resigned from the cabinet. Eugenio Sr., for his part, used the Manila Chronicle and ABS-CBN to take increasingly critical editorial positions against the Marcos administration. The two sides of the family — the business empire and the political alliance — were now pulling against each other, and Marcos noticed.
It ended in November 1972, a few weeks after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law across the country.
Act three: The dictator’s hostage and the forced sale (1972–1986)
On September 21, 1972, Marcos declared martial law. Within weeks, he issued Presidential Decree No. 40, which nationalized the country’s electricity generation and transmission. The Lopez family’s media properties — the Manila Chronicle and ABS-CBN — were seized almost immediately. But those, as one account of the period put it, were merely the appetizers. The main course was Meralco.
In November 1972, Eugenio Lopez Jr. — “Geny,” Eugenio Sr.’s eldest son — was arrested by the military and detained at Fort Bonifacio. The official charge was involvement in an alleged assassination plot against Marcos. The Lopez family’s own account of what came next has never changed in the decades since.
The arrest of Geny Lopez was the leverage. The patriarch, a father before he was a businessman, was presented with an arrangement: sign over control of Meralco, and his son’s situation would improve. The family’s description of the negotiation that followed was that it resembled a kidnap-for-ransom situation. As Oscar Lopez, Eugenio Sr.’s son, would later say publicly: “Enrile, the martial law administrator acting for the mastermind of the kidnap for ransom gang, was keeping my brother Geny hostage at Fort Bonifacio, and the military had taken over Meralco and all its facilities.”
The patriarch signed. Control of Meralco Securities Corporation was transferred to a shell company called Meralco Foundation Inc., controlled by Benjamin “Kokoy” Romualdez, Marcos’s brother-in-law. The down payment recorded for this transaction was P10,000. The agreed purchase price was P150 million, to be paid in installments that were never fully made.
But Geny Lopez was not released. He remained detained at Fort Bonifacio for almost 5 years, until he and fellow political prisoner Sergio Osmeña III managed to escape in September 1977. The patriarch had given up the company, and the son was still in prison.
The family’s sacrifice had bought them nothing they had been promised.
Marcos’s hold on Meralco lasted through the entire span of martial law. When the People Power Revolution of February 1986 toppled the dictatorship, the new government of Corazon Aquino began the process of returning assets that had been seized or transferred under duress. Meralco Foundation had defaulted on its installment payments under the terms of the original transfer agreement, which gave legal grounds for the shares to revert. Through years of court cases and negotiations, the Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that the unpaid shares should revert to the Lopezes. The undisputed control they once had was not fully theirs again, but they were back.
Who has owned Meralco, and when
The table below is not an official disclosure, but a way of seeing, at a glance, how many different sets of hands have shaped this company across 122 years, and what was happening in the country each time ownership shifted.
| Period | In control | Notable other shareholders |
|---|---|---|
| 1903–1961 | Americans (Charles Swift, then General Public Utilities) | Filipino public investors gradually entering through the decades |
| 1961–1972 | Lopez family (Eugenio Lopez Sr., then Manuel Lopez) | Various public shareholders |
| 1972–1986 | Marcos regime via Kokoy Romualdez (Meralco Foundation Inc.) | Government-controlled entirely |
| 1986–1991 | Legal and political transition under the Aquino government | Government pension funds begin accumulating shares |
| 1991–2007 | Lopez family restored (through First Philippine Holdings Corp.) | Union Fenosa of Spain (about 9%); GSIS (about 23%); SSS, PhilHealth, Land Bank, Pag-IBIG (combined about 10%) |
| 2007–2008 | Lopez family at 33.4% after buying Union Fenosa’s stake | GSIS turns hostile shareholder under Winston Garcia |
| 2009–2013 | Three-way contest: Lopez + Pangilinan (MPIC/PLDT) + San Miguel Corp. | GSIS and SSS exit by selling their stakes to San Miguel |
| 2013–present | Pangilinan group via Beacon/MPIC (about 48%) + Gokongwei family via JG Summit (about 27%) | Lopez family reduced to a token 3.95% stake, then largely gone; public float about 26% |
One observation worth sitting with: the roughly 26% public float — the shares of Meralco that trade freely on the Philippine Stock Exchange — means that through SSS and GSIS contributions, ordinary Filipino workers may still hold an indirect, very small piece of Meralco today, through the pension funds that invest those contributions in listed companies. The people who pay the bills and the people who own a sliver of the company are, in many cases, the same people.
Act four: The Spanish partner, the pension funds, and the war for the boardroom (1991–2013)
When the Lopezes came back to Meralco in the early 1990s, they came back into a different kind of shareholder environment. The company had gone public through an IPO in 1991 — at the time, the largest stock offering in the history of the Manila Stock Exchange, with shares that quickly soared to over P500 each. A broad base of institutional and individual investors now owned pieces of the company. Among the most significant of those institutions were the Philippine government’s own pension funds.
The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), which manages retirement benefits for government employees, had accumulated about 23% of Meralco’s shares by the mid-2000s. The Social Security System (SSS), PhilHealth, Land Bank of the Philippines, and Pag-IBIG collectively held another 10%. At their combined peak, government financial institutions controlled about 33% of the company. For the Lopezes, whose restored stake never climbed back above 17% of what had been returned to them through the courts, the government’s presence as a major shareholder was both a fact of life and a source of vulnerability.
It was also, at one point, genuinely ironic in a way that a senator pointed out on the floor of Congress: Filipino workers were paying their monthly electricity bills to Meralco and paying their monthly SSS and GSIS contributions to pension funds that turned around and invested in Meralco. The same money was cycling through different channels, and the same company sat at both ends of the loop.
The Lopezes also had a strategic partnership with a Spanish company during this period. Union Fenosa, then the second-largest electricity utility in Spain, had become a minority shareholder in Meralco since the late 1990s through a joint venture called First Philippine Union Fenosa. The Lopez group had brought Union Fenosa in because the Spanish company carried operational expertise and the credibility of a global utility alongside a Filipino-managed company. When Union Fenosa decided to exit the Philippine market around 2007, the Lopezes bought their approximately 9% stake rather than let it fall into unknown hands. That purchase, funded by debt, was part of what left the family financially exposed when shareholder pressure intensified and the global financial crisis arrived at the same time.
That pressure arrived in the form of GSIS president Winston Garcia, who in 2008 began a very public campaign against the Lopez-controlled Meralco management, accusing it of overcharging consumers, mismanaging the company’s finances, and refusing to open its books even to a shareholder holding nearly 25% of the company. Garcia was not speaking softly. He called it corporate mischief. He compared Meralco’s electricity rates to those of other distribution utilities in the country and argued that Meralco, with its size and volume, should have been the cheapest rather than among the most expensive.
The 2008 annual stockholders’ meeting became the setting for what was reportedly the longest such meeting in Philippine corporate history, running from 9 in the morning until 10:30 at night. The GSIS attempted to invalidate certain proxies to gain control of the proceedings. The Lopez management team, with a battalion of lawyers, refused to yield and held the meeting to its conclusion. The Lopezes won that day, but the battle had exposed how thin their margin of control really was.
The following year, the Lopez family made the decision that effectively ended their 48-year relationship with Meralco. They sold 20% of their stake to the Pangilinan group — specifically to entities controlled by Manuel V. Pangilinan through Metro Pacific Investments Corporation and PLDT. Oscar Lopez, the family patriarch who authorized the sale, described it as necessary given the debts the family had accumulated, including those taken on to buy out Union Fenosa’s stake.
The sale to Pangilinan in 2009 triggered a chaotic 3-way contest that played out over the next 4 years. San Miguel Corporation under Ramon Ang had entered the picture by acquiring the GSIS’s 27% stake, apparently positioning itself to force a standoff or accumulate enough shares for its own control. For a period, three of the most consequential conglomerates in the Philippines were simultaneously maneuvering for the same company, each acquiring shares, soliciting proxies, and testing where the others’ limits were.
By 2013, Ramon Ang concluded that winning Meralco was not worth what it would cost, and sold San Miguel’s entire stake to JG Summit Holdings, the conglomerate of the Gokongwei family, for approximately P72 billion. The Gokongweis had been watching from a distance throughout the earlier skirmishes, positioned as natural allies of the Pangilinan camp through their shared stake in PLDT.
The Lopez family had, by the time of San Miguel’s exit, already reduced their remaining position to a token 3.95%. The name that had been synonymous with Meralco for nearly half a century was barely visible on the shareholder register. For the full account of how that exit unfolded, and what it cost the family in ways that went beyond share price, the Esquire Philippines piece How the Lopez Family Lost Meralco is the most complete telling of that story.
Act five: The law that drew the lines, and the lines that were always going to move (2001 onward)
Running alongside the ownership drama of the 2000s was a structural transformation of the entire Philippine electricity industry that would eventually determine what Meralco was legally allowed to become.
In 2001, Congress passed the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, known as EPIRA. The problem it was designed to solve was real and severe. The National Power Corporation, the state entity that had controlled much of the country’s electricity generation and transmission for decades, had accumulated liabilities that peaked at over P830 billion. Power outages were routine. Electricity rates in the Philippines were among the highest in Asia. The system was neither reliable nor affordable, and it was not structured in a way that gave any player an incentive to make it better.
EPIRA’s solution was to break the industry into 4 distinct layers and require that different companies handle each one. Generation, the power plants, would be competitive and open to private investors. Transmission — the long-distance, high-voltage lines that carry electricity across the country, which you can think of as the national highway of electricity — would remain a regulated monopoly under a single operator. Distribution — the neighborhood delivery network of poles, wires, and transformers that bring electricity into homes and offices — would stay regulated but remain in the hands of private utilities like Meralco. And supply, the retail relationship with the end customer, would eventually be opened to competition for large users.
The analogy that makes this clearest: imagine the government deciding that the same company should not be allowed to own the farm, run the delivery trucks, and operate the grocery store, all at once. EPIRA was that decision, applied to electricity. Each layer of the supply chain would be separated, and each would be governed by its own rules.
For Meralco, the law placed it firmly in the distribution lane. Move electricity from the national grid to your wall socket, charge a government-regulated fee for doing so, and leave generation and long-distance transmission to others. The government regulator — the Energy Regulatory Commission, or ERC — would approve Meralco’s distribution rates, set a ceiling on its earnings from that business, and ensure it was not earning more than a fair return on the infrastructure it owned and operated.
The financial reality of that arrangement was less comfortable than it looked on paper. The generation charge — the cost of the actual electricity produced by power plants — makes up the largest single item on any Meralco bill, often more than half the total. Meralco collects that charge from you and forwards it directly to the power plants that produced your electricity. It keeps nothing from it. Its actual earnings come only from the distribution charge, which is a fraction of the total bill and which the government caps. Being the largest electricity company in the country but earning only from a small fraction of what flows through its hands is like owning the most-used toll road in the Philippines but being allowed to collect fees only on motorcycles.
EPIRA also allowed distribution companies to own up to 50% of their own power supply. That provision, written as a limit rather than an invitation, was the door left open. Under the Pangilinan-Gokongwei ownership that consolidated between 2009 and 2013, Meralco would eventually walk through it, and keep walking.
What Meralco built on the other side of that door is the subject of the next piece in this series.
The company that stayed
In April 2025, President Bongbong Marcos signed the law renewing Meralco’s distribution franchise for another 25 years, extending it from its scheduled expiration in 2028 all the way to 2053. The signing happened in the same city, in the same political context, where a different Marcos had once seized the company from the family that built it, on a night in 1972 when the difference between a business decision and a ransom note was not entirely clear.
History does not repeat itself in business any more than it does anywhere else. But it does accumulate. Every ownership change in Meralco’s 122-year life left something behind — a legal precedent, a debt structure, a shareholder agreement, a regulatory framework, a strategic relationship. The company that exists today is the product of all of them: the American franchise, the Lopez Filipinization, the martial law seizure, the EDSA restoration, the EPIRA reform, the boardroom war, the Pangilinan consolidation, the Gokongwei partnership, and the franchise renewal that now runs past the middle of the century.
Through all of it, the wires stayed in the ground, the meters kept turning, and the bills kept arriving. That continuity is not an accident. It is the whole point.
This is the first in a two-part series on Meralco. The second piece looks at what the company has become under its current owners — and what it is building toward.
Lala Rimando 
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