CL Fi­nan­cial chair­man Ger­ald Yet­ming has blamed a hos­tile takeover bid to pur­chase Las­celles de­Mer­ca­do, launched by William Mc­Connel, the for­mer chief ex­ec­u­tive of the icon­ic Ja­maican con­glom­er­ate for the fail­ure to im­ple­ment a step-by-step plan to re­pay the Las­celles cred­i­tors.Yet­ming, who is al­so the chair­man of Las­celles, was re­spond­ing, in a full-page ad­ver­tise­ment in to­day's Guardian "in the in­ter­est of trans­paren­cy and to avoid mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions in the pub­lic do­main con­cern­ing the US$342 mil­lion debt owed by CL Spir­its, a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of CL Fi­nan­cial."

The US$342 mil­lion ($2.2 bil­lion) debt is owed to cred­i­tors in Ja­maica and T&T as a re­sult of the ac­qui­si­tion in 2008 by CL Fi­nan­cial of Las­celles de­Mer­ca­do.Yet­ming said that CL Fi­nan­cial, which owns 87 per cent of the Las­celles com­mon shares, had de­vel­oped a plan to un­lock share­hold­er val­ue, re­struc­ture the com­pa­nies, re­pay cred­i­tors and cre­ate val­ue for share­hold­ers "who will be own­ers of a glob­al spir­its com­pa­ny."

Ac­cord­ing to Yet­ming, the hos­tile takeover bid, led by Mc­Connell "has pre­vent­ed the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the plan."Yet­ming said as far as Las­celles is con­cerned, the Mc­Connell bid is "fun­da­men­tal­ly flawed and, as a re­sult, in­ef­fec­tive in law."He al­so al­leged that there have been breach­es of Ja­maica's se­cu­ri­ties laws in the at­tempt­ed take over.