Financial Times

Al-Nakib says E.B. Creasy bonus share sale still murky
Talib Al-Nakib, the Kuwaiti investor who has gone to courts against E.B. Creasy, has alleged that he has not found any records of the sale of 4.5 million bonus shares that E.B. Creasy received from its subsidiary company, Lankem Ceylon.

He claims that the company acted in contempt of court by acting against a court order restraining them from lending money to its subsidiaries.
He said that E.B. Creasy, which acquired 4.5 million bonus shares from its subsidiary company, Lankem Ceylon had manipulated the funds by transferring them among the group companies. He said that when he questioned this at the firm’s AGM, he was rudely responded to.

In a letter to The Sunday Times disputing E.B. Creasy Managing Director, S.D.D.R. Arudpragasam’s allegation that he had not read the semi-annual report of the company, Al-Nakib stated that it is ‘obvious’ that the bonus shares have been disposed of covertly and his questions at the AGM remain unanswered.

“It is our undisputed right as shareholders to know what happened to the bonus shares we have ‘supposedly’ received,” he has said in the letter. He has further stated that despite the chairman, A. Rajaratnam saying that those bonus shares were sold in the stock market, the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) records do not show the price or the date of the sale.

He has said that in March 2005, the High Court issued an order restraining the firm from lending money to the parent company, Colombo Fort Land and Building Company (CFLB) and its subsidiaries, but it had increased a loan from Rs.39 million to Rs.221 million to subsidiary, Muller and Phipps.
The Sunday Times FT reported on December 11 about the E.B. Creasy and Company AGM and Arudpragasam had responded to the article last Sunday.

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