Near the end of Friday's annual meeting of Angostura shareholders at the company's Laventille headquarters, a representative from one of the country's commercial banks asked Rolph Balgobin, the chairman of the rum and bitters producer, whether the company was for sale.
Dr Balgobin, who is president of the local manufacturers' association, told shareholders that "as far as the directors were concerned," the company was not for sale.
The Angostura chairman's response underscores the mixed signals and lack of information in how the current administration is dealing with the final resolution of this Clico matter, which has been dragging on now for more than seven years.
There are mixed signals because in his April 8 mid-year budget review, Finance Minister Colm Imbert was clear when he said: "We have also requested the Central Bank to transfer to the Government, Clico's shares in Angostura, Home Construction and CL World Brands, valued at $3 billion more or less and after this transfer we will take the appropriate decisions to dispose of assets in a sensible and productive manner.
"With particular reference to lands owned by Angostura and/or Home Construction, it is the Government's intention to acquire these assets for public purposes such as housing, tourism and infrastructure development."
Now, it could be that the government has taken the sale of Angostura off the table, for the time being.
The fact that the government envisages that its fiscal deficit for the 2016 fiscal year is likely to be $9.7 billion, or 6 per cent of GDP, rather than the $6.7 billion, or 4 per cent of GDP, envisaged by Minister of Finance Colm Imbert on April 8, may be an acknowledgment that the government is unlikely to sell Methanol Holdings (International) Ltd and the insurer's traditional portfolio by the end of the current fiscal year on September 30.
Mr Imbert had included the sale of those assets for a total value of $3 billion in concluding in April that the deficit for 2016 would be $6.7 billion.
But surely if the Minister of Finance has agreed to place a hold on the proposal to transfer to the government the shares in Angostura owned by Clico and CL World Brands and then dispose of those shares, that information should have been communicated to the market as it is material information.
According to Angostura's 2015 annual report, the company's two largest shareholders are Clico, which owns 66,971,877 shares, or about 32 per cent and Rumpro, which owns 92,551,212 shares, or 45 per cent. One hundred per cent of Rumpro, which is based in St Lucia, is owned by CL World Brands, 42 per cent of which is owned by Clico and 58 per cent by CL Financial.
There are also credible reports that the CL Financial shareholder representatives on the company's board objected to the minister's reference to the sale of assets and refused to entertain the government appointees on the Angostura board until certain assurances were given.
This would tend to support Dr Balgobin's own comment at the start of the meeting that he only became a director of Angostura on May 12, although the company's previous chairman, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Maurice Suite, resigned on April 11.
Why else would the government wait for a month before filling the vacancy left by Mr Suite's resignation?
One of the questions coming out of the Angostura meeting is whether Clico's shares in Angostura, CL World Brands and Home Construction are going to form part of the settlement of Clico's debt to the government?
If those shares, which are worth at least $3 billion, are not going to go towards the settlement of the insurer's debt to Clico, how is that debt going to be settled?
At the annual meeting, the Angostura chairman also addressed concerns raised at the three previous annual meetings about the $984 million debt that CL Financial owes Angostura, which has been on the books of the rum and bitters company since 2008 as a $984 million receivable, for which an equal provision has been made.
Balgobin told shareholders that as of last week, CL Financial had acknowledged the outstanding balance owed to Angostura, which he said alleviated concerns about the debt becoming statute barred.
Balgobin, who is chairman of both CL Financial and Angostura, gave shareholders of the publicly listed company the assurance that the managements of both companies would negotiate an appropriate plan for the settlement of the $984 million debt.
He proposed to hold a special meeting of Angostura shareholders within 150 days, at which the management of the company would present debt-settlement options to the manufacturers' owners. He said that that meant a 120-day timeframe to conclude the negotiations.
It's interesting that most of the shareholders who spoke in the question and answer segment of the annual meeting were interested in finding out why the matter of the CL Financial debt to Angostura had taken so long to be resolved.
�2 Disclosure: The author is chief editor, business of Guardian Media Ltd and is a minority shareholder of Angostura Holdings Ltd.