The Victorias Milling Company has awarded to Tanduay Holdings Inc. 10.66 percent of its subscribed shares owned by the Miguel J. Ossorio Pension Foundation, VMC said in a disclosure released by the Philippine Stock Exchange yesterday.

Abelardo Bugay, chairman of VMC Retirement Committee, sent an advise to Tanduay that VMC sold 170,133,159 of its shares to the rhum-making company of the Lucio Tan Group of Companies.

Tanduay submitted its bid for the Ossorio shares last week, the PSE said in an earlier disclosure.

The Tan group infused P300 million in fresh capital to VMC in 2003 through the Philippine National Bank, also a Tan-controlled company which now owns a 10.15 percent stake in the country's largest sugar refinery.

Last week, Tanduay Holdings Inc. president Wilson Young said in a news report that VMC, which is under a 12-year rehabilitation program after incurring substantial losses from operations in the late 1990's, will likely exit from rehabilitation in two to three years or even earlier.

VMC, which has posted profit in the last two years, is expected to hit a net income of at least P150 million for 2007, Young also said.

The sugar mill has reached a net income of P47 million for the fiscal year which ended August 2006, coming from P270.86 million in losses in the past year.

In June 2006, the VMC disclosed that Deutsche Bank AG London acquired 36,888,836 of its shares while in May, the sugar mill signed a debt restructuring agreement with AB Capital, one of its creditors. It also said that time that all of its obligations to the Bank of the Philippine Island Group of Companies had already been sold to Asset Pool A Inc.*NLG

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