When the news broke about an Indonesian tycoon making a massive $5 billion offer for a stake in Energy Development Corporation (EDC), my corporate-watcher brain immediately started pulling at the threads.
On one end is a massive offer. On the other, a company wrapped in layers of complexity: It’s owned by the Lopezes—who are currently navigating an ongoing family or cousins’ war—but it’s also heavily owned by foreign investors.
The immediate reporting question became: Whose stake is the billionaire actually targeting? Is the offer for the Lopez stake via EDC’s parent company, First Gen? Or is it for Singapore’s wealth fund GIC Pte and Australian investment firm Macquarie Asset Management? They are the foreign investors in EDC who actually hold the larger economic stake—meaning they get more share of the profits—but hold less voting power.
Untangling that ownership matrix and how the family feud might dictate whether a change of hands is even considered was enough to fill a piece. But as I opened up my decades-old notes, the name EDC started ringing a lot of familiar bells. My draft was getting way too long, and I realized this wasn’t just a story about a modern, regional buy offer. It was a history lesson. That’s why it became a two-part series.
For anyone who watches the Philippine business and economy, EDC carries serious historical weight. It was incredibly controversial when it was being privatized, and the way it was structured was downright weird.
Think about it: there’s the steam coming from under the earth, and then you have the power plant sitting right on top of the ground turning that steam into power. But they were separately owned by two different state-owned corporations. What the Lopezes bought initially was just the steam. And, wow, it was very expensive.
To make matters worse, the loans they took out to buy EDC were immediately hit by the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. The forex rate hiked up, making those loans brutally expensive.
THAT was the key reason the Lopezes ultimately sacrificed their historic stake and control of Meralco. They had acquired Meralco way back from the Americans in a bold move that marked the Lopez family as the real deal when it came to industrializing post-war Philippines. Giving it up in 2009 was huge.
I’ve previously written about exactly how the Lopezes lost Meralco for Esquire, but that specific piece focused heavily on the brutal political environment the family was up against in 2008 during the Arroyo administration. The political squeeze was real. But the math and the crushing debt from EDC were the financial engines driving that loss.
And it was only later, using the proceeds of additional sale that whittled down further their pre-sale 33.4% stake to the current measly 3.9%, that the Lopezes were finally able to buy the power plants that the steam wells were powering.
This intersection of business and hostile politics isn’t new for them. The Lopezes have a long, documented history of landing on the wrong side of political power—a pattern of dissent and its heavy corporate costs that I traced across the Marcos, Arroyo, and Duterte eras in an explainer for Rappler.
So EDC and the Lopezes share a deep, painful history where corporate strategy, debt, and politics constantly collide. That alone deserved its own space in Part 2.
But there’s an even bigger macro irony here. Look at the history of EDC itself. It was born in 1976 during a global supply crisis triggered by OPEC and Middle East issues. The idea was to tap an indigenous source of energy—right there under the earth, a natural benefit of the Philippines being located within the Ring of Fire—to make the country less dependent on imported oil.
Now, look at us today. We are facing yet another global oil supply crisis as the Strait of Hormuz is closed by Iran as it responds to constant bombing by Israel and ally, the US. And EDC, which was created to solve this exact issue decades ago, is back in the news. Not because of how it will make the Philippines more energy secure, but because there might be a change of hands among owners. And that warring family? They sit right at the center of whether a deal even happens.
When a single news flash connects a 1970s energy crisis to a 2009 corporate sacrifice, shifting political tides, and a 2026 family feud, you don’t write a quick update. You write a two-part series.
The Reading List:
- The 2-part series on Indonesia’s offer, Meralco loss, and EDC history:
- The Political Context Backgrounders:
- Esquire: How the Lopez family lost Meralco (The 2008 Arroyo-era political environment)
- Rappler: The cost of dissent: How the Lopez family feud ties into Marcos, Arroyo, Duterte politics
Lala Rimando 
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