Duprey's Dalco withdraws appeal

Lawrence Duprey’s company DALCO - the largest shareholder in CL Financial (CLF) – has formally withdrawn an appeal of a judge’s order which had effectively shut it out of the State’s winding-up petition.

DALCO, in September, had appealed Justice Kevin Ramcharan’s ruling that the shareholding group advanced no evidence it had sufficient interests to be heard in opposition of the petition or that the conglomerate was not insolvent, as claimed by the Government.

The winding-up petition was eventually granted by Ramcharan on September 15, which gave the go-head to the Government to have CLF liquidated to recover a $15 billion debt to taxpayers as part of the 2009 bailout of four of the company’s subsidiaries. At a hearing in the Court of Appeal on Monday, DALCO’s attorneys formally withdrew their appeal.

In its winding-up petition filed on July 11, the Government claimed that the company’s level of insolvency still poses a systemic risk to the country’s financial system and after eight years, it will not recover to a satisfactory state of solvency. As the principal creditor – by virtue of the $23 billion bailout of CLF and its subsidiaries in 2009 – the Government has the majority of the directors on the board and sought to have the conglomerate liquidated to recover the debt owed to taxpayers.