Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd record­ed a loss of $211.0 mil­lion for 2014, as the fi­nan­cial­ly trou­bled com­pa­ny wrote down the val­ue of its in­vest­ment in the Bar­ba­dos-based Arawak Ce­ment Com­pa­ny by $153 mil­lion and in de­ferred tax as­sets by $86 mil­lion.

At a news con­fer­ence at a cor­po­rate box at the Queen's Park Oval yes­ter­day, TCL chair­man Wil­fred Es­pinet said if the one-time im­pair­ment ex­pens­es were ex­clud­ed from the re­sults, the prof­it af­ter tax fig­ure would have amount­ed to $88 mil­lion, which would have been 166 per cent high­er on a like-by-like ba­sis than in 2013.

He said: "We de­cid­ed to fol­low pru­dent man­age­ment and ad­dressed sev­er­al mat­ters raised by au­di­tors that have been open for sev­er­al years, there­fore the com­pa­ny's re­sults were af­fect­ed by big non-cash ex­pens­es."How­ev­er, I am pleased that the op­er­at­ing prof­it ex­clud­ing the ex­tra­or­di­nary items grew at dou­ble dig­it."

This was in ap­par­ent ref­er­ence to the fact that TCL's EBIT­DA (earn­ings be­fore, in­ter­est, tax­a­tion, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­sa­tion and exlud­ing ex­tra­or­di­nary items to­talled $465 mil­lion in 2014, com­pared with $410 in 2013.

TCL's EBIT­DA in 2014 was im­pact­ed by ex­tra­or­di­nary ex­pens­es of $57 mil­lion, which in­clud­ed the cost of the un­suc­cess­ful debt re­fi­nanc­ing ex­er­cise ($19 mil­lion), le­gal costs in cas­es against share­hold­ers ($6 mil­lion), the im­pair­ment of aged clink­er ($20 mil­lion) and the pro­vi­sion of un­fund­ed back­pay to em­ploy­ees ($12 mil­lion).