Share prices of once-dormant listed petroleum exploration companies have doubled and even more than quadrupled in recent days, from their March 2020 lows, thanks to the so-called lifting by President Duterte of the moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the West Philippine Sea (WPS). Announcement of the lifting was not made by the presidential palace but by the Department of Energy on Oct. 15, 2020. The price of Phoenix Petroleum Holdings rose from a low of P6.61 per share on March 13, 2020 to a 52-week high of P16.64 on Oct. 19, 2020, a spectacular jump of 152 percent, without the company doing anything significant to justify a 1.5x increase in valuation, equivalent to a gain of P15.2 billion in market value, from P9.3 billion in March 2020 to P23.41 billion by last week.

Lopez, T. (2020, October 28). An oil boom?. Manila Standard, p. B1.