Federico “Piki” Lopez did not ignore the elephant in the room. On Friday, April 17, he walked into a town hall with employees of First Gen, the Lopez group’s power company focused on gas and renewable energy, in Makati. In the middle of a court battle over moves to oust him as president of Lopez Inc., he opened by asking, half-joking, what they were going to talk about.

“There’s this big elephant in the room that we’ll pretend is not there,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by Rappler. “But anyway, I decided to just talk about it. But first of all, I don’t want to turn this town hall into a rally that foments hate.

It’s not my style. It’s not the way I think we should be dealing with these kinds of problems.” He then reframed the fight. “In a nutshell, I just wanted to say that this is really… I don’t want to say shareholder battle, but it’s really a shareholder conflict that’s going on,” he said.

“There’s no need for you to take sides.” He added that “shareholder disagreements,” after all, “have a way of working themselves out. And they will, despite all the animosity that you see there.” In Quezon City, ABS‑CBN held its own town hall earlier this week. The Lopez family’s flagship media company and former dominant TV network now operates as a multi‑platform content producer after losing its franchise in 2020.

The message to staff and management was similar but more emotional. According to an officer present, CEO Carlo Katigbak, speaking mostly in Filipino, acknowledged the Lopez family dispute but urged employees to “stay the course,” “keep serving audiences,” and “ignore the noise” around the feud. He reminded them that the company, despite its losses, is not a failing enterprise.

Those themes are spelled out in a series of statements filed with regulators and released publicly on March 28, April 15, 16, and 17. ABS-CBN president and CEO Carlo L. Katigbak.

Courtesy of ABS-CBN News Holy Week, suffering, and ‘moments like this’ Piki began his Makati town hall not with numbers but with Holy Week. He told employees that over the break, he and his wife Monina had stayed in Metro Manila. “Monina and I spent it just here.

It’s nice and quiet. There’s no traffic,” he said. “For Good Friday, rather than just doing our regular prayers, we watched The Passion of Christ, the Mel Gibson movie.” He turned to his wife with dark humor.

“I kept telling her, so which stage am I? Agony in the Garden or Crowning of Thorns?” he said, drawing laughter in the room. The jokes led to a more serious point.

“Sometimes you feel a lot of the backstabbing, even from people that you’ve known for a very, very long time,” he said. “But the one conclusion that we came out with was, everything that we’re going through is nothing compared to what Christ went through for us.” Then he quoted his wife: “You know, Piki, your whole life has been in preparation for moments like this.” First Gen chairman and CEO Federico “Piki” Lopez (right) speaks with the press. Courtesy of Lopez Link Fighting weight and discipline He followed that with something more prosaic: his weight.

“For the longest time, maybe about a year, I’ve been trying to get down to 61 kilos, my fighting weight,” he said. “I could never do it… Today, I’m down to 61 kilos.” The room applauded. He told them he knows “exercise is very important for you, especially under stress,” and that he has been swimming “faster, and maybe better than I ever have been, maybe in the last 20 years.

Without saying it directly, he was telling engineers and managers at First Gen that he is not crumbling. He is in “fighting weight,” his health metrics are improving, his routines are more disciplined than ever. They, too, he implied, should respond to the family crisis with discipline rather than panic.

Must Read EXCLUSIVE – Debt, discipline, and daring: Inside the Lopez Group’s high-risk bets ‘Professional way’ and who backs him And then he turned to governance. “At FPH (First Philippine Holdings), we have been managing this company in the most professional way,” he said. “Our way of managing is probably, maybe somewhat misunderstood, because it’s rigid.

It’s very regimented, even with regards to our fiduciary responsibilities.” He argued that this “rigid” approach had earned the group the confidence of investors that matter. He said that at FPH, First Gen’s parent, the state pension fund Social Security System (SSS) is among the biggest institutional shareholders. Ownership summaries list the SSS asset-management arm at just over 1% of FPH, with institutions holding around 9% to 10% and Lopezlinked private companies about 69%.

Then he pointed to New York-based KKR as a vote of confidence. KKR, he reminded them, is a shareholder in First Gen. Public filings show that KKR first bought about 12% of First Gen in 2020 via Philippines Clean Energy Holding Inc., then raised this to roughly 20% through a follow-on voluntary tender offer in 2021. For Energy Development Corp. (EDC), the geotherm