Angostura chairman Gerald Yetming, yesterday, assured shareholders at the annual meeting of the rum and bitters producer that the company will not end up as a majority state-owned company, even though the Clico resolution calls for the transfer of Clico's shares in Angostura and CL World Brands (along with Home Construction) to the Government.
Clico owns 32 per cent of Angostura (66.9 million shares) and 48 per cent of CL World Brands, which owns 45 per cent of Angostura (some 92.5 million shares), which means that if both sets of shares are transferred to the Government, it would own 54 per cent of Angostura.
This would make Angostura a majority state-owned company.
Asked what would the Government's stake in Angostura be when Clico's shares in the company and CL World Brands are transferred to the State, Yetming said: "In the final shareholders' agreement, certain transactions are contemplated, which are all linked to the Clico resolution, which is expected to bring a complete and final resolution to the Government's intervention in Clico.
"At the end of it, it is not expected that the Government will end up with any shareholding in Angostura to have it qualify as a state enterprise and I want the shareholders to be reassured of that."
Several of the shareholders at the meeting raised the issue of the $984 million debt that the CL Financial group owes to Angostura, for which the company has made a 100 per cent provision.
Answering one of the shareholders, Yetming said the total resolution of the issues between the Government and CL Financial/Clico is intertwined and that the Angostura board was pursuing the recovery of the $984 million debt in a manner that would be in the best interests of the rum company's shareholders.
Yetming told the shareholders that he did not want to say anything more on the matter because at last year's annual meeting he was reported to the local Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly making a statement of a material, non-public fact at the meeting. Yetming said the fact that he was able to address yesterday's annual meeting was an indication that the SEC investigation had turned up no wrongdoing on his part. He noted that had he been found guilty he would have faced millions of dollars in fines and years in jail.
Minority shareholder activist, Peter Permell, admitted that the person reporting Yetming to the SEC last year was him.
For Angostura's 2014 results, the group generated $217 million in results from continuing operations, which was about 11 per cent higher than the restated results for 2013.
The rum and bitters company's after-tax profit for 2014 was $153.4 million, which was substantially less than the $289 million declared in 2013–a year in which Angostura recorded a one-off gain of $151 million from the sale of assets and the settlement of debt.
