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SPNEC confirms plans to sell 40% stake in Terra Solar project to foreign investors

LOS ANGELES – Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic was named NBA Most valuable Player for the third time in four seasons on Wednesday (Thursday Manila time).

The 29-year-old Serbian star, who won the award in 2021 and 2022, finished runner-up in the voting in 2023 but had the satisfaction of leading the Nuggets to a first NBA title.

This season, he averaged 26.4 points, 12.4 rebounds and 9.0 assists in the regular season and beat out Oklahoma City Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks in final voting for the award.

He became the second player, after Oscar Robertson, to record 2,000 points, 900 rebounds and 600 assists in a season.

His 25 triple-doubles and 68 double -doubles were both second in the league.

Jokic enters elite territory with a third MVP crown. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s six MVPs are the most ever. Bill Russell and Michael Jordan won five apiece and Wilt Chamberlain and LeBron James four.

Jokic joins Moses Malone, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as three-time winners after earning 79 first-placed votes compared to 15 for Gilgeous-Alexander and four for Doncic.

Behind Jokic, the 57-25 Nuggets matched the franchise high for victories in a season — although they were tied for best record in the West with Oklahoma City and ended up with the second seed.

Whether Jokic will b e able to combine an MVP award and the title this season remains to be seen.

The Nuggets dropped the first two games of their Western Conference semifinal series to the Minnesota Timberwolves and face the tough task of trying to claw back on the Timberwolves’ home court starting on Friday.

Jokic’s victory marks the sixth straight season that the MVP award has gone to a player born outside the United States. The last US-born player to win was James Harden in 2018.

SP New Energy [SPNEC 1.10, down 2.6%; 92% avgVol] [link], now a Meralco [MER 374.80 unch; 80% avgVol] subsidiary under Manny V. Pangilinan’s chairmanship, confirmed reports that it plans to sell “up to 40% equity stake in the Terra Solar” project. The report quoted MVP as saying that SPNEC was in talks with three to five potential investors, and then quoted an unnamed executive who said that SPNEC would take in “at most” two of those potential foreign investors for a combined 40% stake in Terra Solar. MVP said that they were trying to engineer it so that each foreign partner might take a 20% stake. MVP noted that SPNEC still intends to meet its 2026 energization target.

MB bottom-line: Not much here has changed. One key here is that MVP and the gang are talking about bringing those investors in at the Terra Solar project level, not at the SPNEC level. I’ve seen a few commenters around in the forums trying to speculate about how a 40% stake sale at the SPNEC level would impact the stock, but that’s not what SPNEC is contemplating here. They’re looking to sell a 40% stake in a private subsidiary. Why 40%? Because the Terra Solar project owns land and foreigners cannot own more than a 40% interest in corporations that own land. This isn’t a case of MER just looking to monetize a chunk of its new toy; MVP and MER have already said that they need to sell this equity stake to finance the development of the project. So this will need to get done, probably sooner rather than later.

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