[Vantage Point] Villar Land’s paper empire unravels

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The façade has finally cracked. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has confirmed that the very appraisal underpinning Villar Land’s trillion-peso “profit” wasn’t just inflated — it failed to comply with International Valuation Standards, making it a textbook case of misrepresentation. It not only supports Vantage Point’s exposé branding the trillion profit as a mirage; a factual forensic analysis which the Villar camp tried to disparage.

E-Value, the appraiser handpicked to justify the ₱1.34-trillion leap in land value, couldn’t even produce the documents that supposedly supported its assumptions and methodology. In other words, the valuation that turned ₱5.2-billion worth of land into “₱1.34 trillion” wasn’t just unbelievable — it was unsupported, undocumented, and unacceptable by global standards.

More than a technical oversight, it is a damning red flag that strikes at the core of corporate honesty, investor protection, and the integrity of the Philippine capital markets. When a valuation firm claims compliance with global standards — but the SEC finds no evidence to back it up — it’s misrepresentation. It casts a dark shadow over every executive and director who relied on that number to trumpet Villar Land’s phony near-₱1-trillion profit. The regulator has drawn blood: the trillion-peso fairy tale wasn’t just aggressive accounting — it was built on a valuation report that doesn’t meet the most basic thresholds of transparency and credibility.

For a brief, dizzying moment, Villar Land looked like it had broken the laws of financial gravity.

On paper, it was suddenly worth over ₱1.3 trillion, after a land revaluation in Villar City turned a ₱5.2-billion acquisition into a ₱1.34-trillion “asset” almost overnight. That sleight of hand helped produce a nearly ₱1-trillion profit for 2024 — what would have been the largest in Philippine corporate history.

The market swallowed the story. Villar Land’s shares last traded at ₱2,296 apiece, valuing the company at around ₱1.48 trillion, more than many long-established conglomerates combined.

Then the adults entered the room.

Audit giant Punongbayan & Araullo (P&A) refused to sign off on the fantasy valuation. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered Villar Land and its appraiser E-Value Philippines to explain how empty or sparsely developed land in Villar City could justify a 25,000% gain. And when the dust settled, Villar Land quietly agreed to slash that valuation by 99%, bringing the supposed ₱1.34-trillion land haul down to a far more earthly figure.

What’s left after the trillion-peso mirage evaporated is now visible in the company’s own audited numbers — numbers that the Villar group can no longer spin away. (READ: From P999-B profit, Villar Land’s 2024 net income flat amid dipping sales)

And those numbers are ugly.

Assets up, liabilities surge, equity shrinks

According to Villar Land’s 2024 audited disclosure:

Total assets climbed from ₱27.98B in 2023 to ₱35.75B in 2024.
Total liabilities exploded from ₱13.86B to ₱22.08B.
Stockholders’ equity actually fell from ₱14.12B to ₱13.67B.

That means:

Assets grew by roughly 28%,
Liabilities increased by almost 60%,
Equity contracted by around 3%.

Does it look like a triumphant trillion-peso juggernaut? This is what a strained balance sheet looks like: more assets funded by more debt, but providing less cushion for shareholders.

If you strip away the hype and just do the math, roughly 62% of Villar Land’s assets are now funded by liabilities, leaving only about 38% backed by equity — yet, this is the same company that recently tried to sell itself as the most valuable listed property play in the country.

The liquidity red flag nobody should ignore

The most damning part of Villar Land’s 2024 profile is not even the asset write-down. It’s the sudden collapse in liquidity:

Current ratio: from 3.48 to 1.46
Quick ratio: from 2.56 to 1.05

A year ago, Villar Land had more than three pesos in current assets for every peso of short-term liabilities. Now, it’s down to ₱1.46. Strip out inventory and prepayments, and the cushion almost disappears: the quick ratio is barely above 1.0.

In plain language: Short-term obligations have ballooned. The buffer to meet them has almost vanished.

Now overlay that with what’s happening outside the balance sheet:

The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) suspended trading in Villar Land shares in May 2025 for failure to file audited 2024 and Q1 2025 reports on time.
The SEC has since fined Villar Land and 11 of its officers ₱12 million, with additional daily penalties for continued non-compliance.

A company whose short-term liquidity is visibly eroding cannot afford to be on the wrong side of both its regulators and its investors. And yet, this is what Villar Land’s situation is: tighter cash, heavier scrutiny.

Revenues down, earnings flat, and the magic of “non-operating” gains

On paper, Villar Land can still claim to be profitable:

Gross revenue fell from ₱4.76B (2023) to ₱3.58B (2024) — a drop of almost 25%.
Net income after tax inched up from ₱1.416B to ₱1.423B — basically flat.
Earnings per share: from ₱2.20 to ₱2.21 — also flat.

And yet the profitability ratios miraculously improved:

Gross margin: 0.59 → 0.62
Net profit margin: 0.30 → 0.40
Return on equity (ROE): holds at about 10%.

How do you get higher margins out of falling revenues and stagnant profits?

Look at what’s happening below the operating line:

Non-operating income jumped from ₱252.9M to ₱686.8M — almost tripling.
Non-operating expenses actually fell slightly.

In other words, core business is weakening, but the bottom line is being propped up by non-operating gains — the same part of the financial statements where that now-infamous ₱1.33-trillion fair value “gain” once sat.

After you’ve seen one of the most aggressive revaluation attempts in Philippine corporate history, you’d be reckless not to question the quality of every peso that comes from “non-operating” sources.

Paying out more than it earns

The retained earnings ledger tells an equally troubling story.

Retained earnings (2023): ₱10.49B
Retained earnings (2024): ₱10.02B
Net income (2024): ₱1.423B

Do the reconciliation, and you’ll find Villar Land effectively paid out around ₱1.9B in dividends or equity adjustments — more than it earned in 2024 — at a time when:

Liquidity was deteriorating,
Liabilities were surging, and
The company was under heavy regulatory fire for its accounting practices.

When a company under a valuation scandal is still prioritizing cash distributions over balance-sheet repair, the question practically writes itself: Is the listed firm being used as a cash machine for its controllers while ordinary investors are left holding the suspension risk and regulatory fallout?

The valuation gap: 1,000× P/E, 100× P/B, and a shattered narrative.

At its last traded price of ₱2,296, Villar Land carried metrics that would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous:

Book value per share (2024): ₱21.22
EPS or earnings per share (2024): ₱2.21

That implies:

A price-to-book ratio of about 108×,
A price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 1,000×.

These are certainly not “premium” valuations. They look more like detached-from-reality valuations, built on the back of a trillion-peso land story that no longer exists in the audited books.

Yet as of the last trading day before suspension, the market still priced Villar Land as if that story were true.

The day trading resumed: A tale of two prices, one ugly truth

After a six-month suspension for failing to file audited reports, Villar Land finally returned to the trading floor on November 13, 2025. The market’s reaction should have been a referendum on corporate honesty. Instead, the reopening exposed something far more dangerous: the collapse of price discovery in the Philippine stock market.

There are two versions reported by the media

Version 1 — The crash

The stock plunged 30% on its first day back, falling from ₱2,296 to ₱1,608,

Wiping out roughly ₱450 billion in market value. Yet unbelievably — even after a 30% collapse, Villar Land still had a market cap of more than ₱1 trillion.

A trillion-peso valuation for a company with ₱1.42B in earnings and ₱21 book value per share. Isn’t it delusion?

Version 2 — The “nothing happened” scenario

This version paints the opposite picture: that Villar Land didn’t fall at all — it even gained 0.17% to ₱2,300, restoring its pre-suspension market cap of ₱1.5 trillion. A company stripped of its trillion-peso accounting trick somehow came back trading as if nothing had happened.

Which is correct? Both — and that’s the problem. Whether it’s ₱1,608 or ₱2,300, both outcomes expose the same hard truth: Villar Land remains valued like a fantasy stock — not a real business. Either the market fell for the hype again, or the stock is so illiquid and insider-dominated that real price discovery is impossible. Either way, it is catastrophic for investor protection.

The market failed — and it failed loudly

A valuation still over ₱1 trillion — even after the scandal — underscores how fragile and distorted our capital markets have become:

A company caught inflating land valuation by 25,000%
Admits a 99% write-down
Fails to submit timely reports
Gets fined by the SEC
Loses auditor confidence

…yet still trades at: 1,000× earnings, over 100× book value, higher than Ayala Land and SM Prime combined. If this doesn’t alarm investors, regulators, and policymakers, nothing will.

This is not just a problem for Villar Land shareholders. It’s an indictment of a broader ecosystem — from brokers and analysts who cheered the rise, to regulators who moved late, to media players who repeated the trillion-peso headline without interrogating how an “empty or sparsely developed” patch of land could suddenly rival major global properties in value.

SEC, appraisers, and the credibility crisis

To be fair, the SEC has now begun to bare its teeth.

It has fined Villar Land and its officers, and issued a show-cause order to E-Value Philippines, the valuer that slapped a ₱1.33-trillion tag on 366 hectares that Villar Land had just bought for ₱5.2B. P&A, for its part, did what good auditors are supposed to do: it refused to bless an implausible valuation, forcing the company to recognize a 99% write-down and erase more than ₱1.3 trillion in paper wealth. But these late-stage interventions cannot erase the months when:
Villar Land’s unaudited disclosure touting nearly ₱1T in profit freely circulated, trading volumes and valuations ballooned, and the narrative of a “visionary land baron” went largely unchallenged. I have labeled it a “trillion-peso mirage” in my previous column because it captures the scale of the credibility crisis now hanging over the Villar group and, by extension, over the country’s capital markets.

From balance-sheet strength to trust insolvency

Look again at the 2024 ratios:

Return on equity (ROE) at 10% might look respectable — until you remember it sits on a much smaller, post-write-down asset base and depends increasingly on non-operating income.
Interest coverage at 5.69× looks okay — until you consider that future borrowing costs may rise sharply for a company that has just been publicly rebuked by its regulator and auditor.
Debt-to-equity may be presented at a modest 0.37, but that hides the fact that total liabilities now make up about 62% of assets, and that some obligations may be tucked outside the narrow definition of “debt.”

Villar Land’s greatest vulnerability today is no longer its leverage or its liquidity — serious as those are.

Its greatest vulnerability is trust:

Trust from investors who now realize that the trillion-peso story was a castle built on appraisals that failed to pass audit.
Trust from lenders who must decide how much exposure they are comfortable holding to a company whose financials have been radically restated.
Trust from regulators and the investing public who are watching how this saga is resolved and what precedent it sets.

Why this matters beyond Villar Land

This is not just about one billionaire or one property firm.

When a listed company can:

Trumpet ₱1.33 trillion in fair-value gains before an audit is completed,
See its stock price soar, and
Then quietly take a 99% cut on that same valuation after the auditor and regulator intervene.

It sends a chilling message:

In the Philippines, paper wealth can still be conjured, traded, and celebrated long before anyone asks if it’s real.

If pension funds, banks, and ordinary investors are exposed to that kind of “wealth,” they deserve to know exactly what they’re buying. They deserve a regulator that moves swiftly, an exchange that demands answers, and auditors who are empowered — and protected — when they say “no.”

The Villar Land numbers you see now — shrinking revenues, collapsing liquidity, swollen liabilities, and cash payouts that exceed earnings — are not just a financial snapshot.

They are evidence of how far the story was allowed to go before anyone hit the brakes.

And until the market, the regulators, and the political establishment are willing to confront that uncomfortable truth, the real scandal won’t be the trillion pesos that disappeared. It will be the credibility that goes with it. – Rappler.com