Amlac fades into liquidation
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Consumer Industries Editor
CAPE TOWN Amlac, the automotive paints and lubricants company suspended from trade on the JSE Securities Exchange SA in May last year for failing to publish financial statements, has slipped quietly into liquidation.
Amlac's telephones were not ringing on Thursday and Friday last week. The company's attorney, Stanley Brasg of Stanley Brasg & Associates, confirmed on Friday that Amlac was liquidated on October 7 in the Johannesburg High Court after an application by the Etcetera Trust, its major shareholder. The trust was owed about R18m, which was lent to the company, and it had also repaid a debt Amlac owed to TA Bank last year.
The lead liquidator is Malcolm Schmidt of Resolution Trust, with his coliquidators G van Tonder of LCM Trustees and JMM Bezuidenhout of Coopers Trust.
Schmidt said on Friday that the liquidators had only just been appointed, and were still investigating the company's affairs.
Initial indications were that Amlac's has about R4,5m in assets and its liabilities come to about R24m.
The assets are mainly the company's investments in its wholly-owned subsidiaries, which in turn own properties. It is too early to say whether the subsidiaries will be sold as going concerns or whether the assets they own will be sold.
The liquidators had not yet had time to notify the JSE Securities Exchange SA, which said earlier on Friday that it has been trying to arrange a meeting with Amlac's directors to raise the JSE's concerns.
Amlac was still required, although suspended from trade, to publish regular financial statements in terms of the Companies Act. It has never reported results for the year to December 2001 or any subsequent period. Shareholders were also promised by its directors in April 2002 (an assurance repeated in an interview in April this year), that they intended imminently to make a buyout offer to shareholders at 50c a share because the costs of maintaining a listing were too high and as a small capitalisation company it was attracting no interest from institutional investors.
Last October the Insider Trading Directorate reached a settlement with five individuals, including a director of Amlac, who agreed to pay a total of R12m in instalments relating to transactions in Amlac shares in July and August 2000. It could not be established from the directorate on Friday whether these amounts were paid. Once all instalments were paid, the directorate said it would publish a notice inviting claims from people who traded shares on certain days in that period.
Oct 27 2003 07:28:53:000AM Charlotte Mathews Business Day 1st Edition
Monday
27 October 2003
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