Ashford W. Meikle, Staff ReporterSeven months after it was suspended from the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE), trading in the Dyoll Group's shares is to resume in a matter of weeks.
In a release on Friday, the JSE said that "the board of the Jamaica Stock Exchange on Wednesday, September 16, decided to lift the suspension on the trading of shares in Dyoll Group Ltd. on or before October 11, provided that the company submits its outstanding financial statements."
The decision was reached at the JSE's monthly meeting.
The stock exchange said that trading would resume as soon as the Dyoll Group submitted its second quarter results (to June 30), which is almost four weeks late. Companies have a 45-day grace period to submit quarterly results. In Dyoll's case, this would have expired some time around August 15.
The move by the JSE comes
on the heels of the decision by
the directors to transform the
Dyoll Group into a real estate entity.
Trading in Dyoll's shares was suspended on February 15 this year because of the group's inability, according to the JSE, "to provide material information to the JSE in keeping with the exchange's policy statement on timely disclosure (JSE's Rule Book, Appendix 8)."
At the time, there were rumours swirling about the erosion of Dyoll Insurance Company's capital base, because of a surfeit of insurance claims in the Cayman Islands as a result of Hurricane Ivan. In March, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) took control of the insurance company, send-ing in Kenneth Tomlinson of Business Recovery Services Limited as temporary manager to do an audit of the company. Within a week of the takeover, the FSC sold the Jamaican portfolio to Jamaica International Insurance Company, a GraceKennedy subsidiary.
In June, the Supreme Court (Jamaica) gave the FSC the go-ahead to liquidate the insurance company, which has a deficit of $1.2 billion.
With the sale of the insurance company, the remaining significant operation in the Dyoll group are the subsidiary, Dyoll Wataru Company and the associated company Seville Development Corporation Limited. Recently, the company entered into negotiations to sell its 51 per cent equity
in Dyoll Wataru to a local businessman.
In fact, it is through the receivables from the sale of the 800-acre Drax Hall property in St. Ann that the directors hope to outfit the new Dyoll Group. At the recent annual general meeting of Dyoll Group, the management spoke of plans to recapitalise the group through a rights issue to shareholders. The intention is to transform the Dyoll Group Limited into a pure property company, eliminate its insurance and coffee businesses, as well as expand the operations of the new Dyoll Group Limited to cover the Caribbean.
Most if not all of the companies which had invested in Dyoll have written off their investments. For example, NCB (which has a 46 per cent stake in Dyoll) allocated an impairment cost of over $500 million in its first quarter results this year.
Earlier this year, in explaining the bank's refusal to bail out Dyoll, NCB Chairman, Michael Lee Chin said, "we folded our tents."
