Patrick El­lis, the group chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer of JMMB Group Ltd (JMM­BGL), yes­ter­day re­vealed the ex­po­sure of the Ja­maica-head­quar­tered, re­gion­al fi­nan­cial com­pa­ny to Ni­Quan En­er­gy, the trou­bled gas-to-liq­uids firm, whose op­er­a­tions are now in abeyance as a re­sult of le­gal, fi­nan­cial and tech­ni­cal is­sues.

El­lis dis­closed the in­for­ma­tion dur­ing a vir­tu­al in­vestor brief­ing host­ed by JMM­BGL to dis­cuss the unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial re­sults of the com­pa­ny for the nine months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2023.

Asked a two-part ques­tion by a Ja­maican jour­nal­ist, which in­clud­ed a query about JMM­BGL’s ex­po­sure to Ni­Quan, El­lis said: “In terms of our ex­po­sure to Ni­Quan, our prin­ci­pal debt that we have is ap­prox­i­mate­ly $65 mil­lion, just prin­ci­pal. The ex­po­sure it­self, if you look at the to­tal ex­po­sure, it is about $175 to $200 mil­lion. The last val­u­a­tion that we had in­ter­nal­ly was about $400 mil­lion, which was the last one that was done. So if you look at a debt to val­ue ex­po­sure it is less than 50 per cent in terms of the over­all debt.

“And I know the strat­e­gy that is be­ing pur­sued is one of op­er­a­tion, which it has been proven; the plant has pro­duced. So, we are very con­fi­dent in terms of the out­come and look­ing for­ward to its con­clu­sion.”

While in re­spond­ing to the ques­tion El­lis did not make clear what cur­ren­cy he was re­fer­ring to, in a March 2023 rat­ings up­date on Ni­Quan En­er­gy, re­gion­al rat­ing agency, Cari­CRIS stat­ed: “As at De­cem­ber 2022, NETL’s to­tal debt stood at US$218.7 mil­lion, a 416.6 per cent in­crease from 2018 and is pro­ject­ed to fur­ther in­crease to US$312 mil­lion as at De­cem­ber 2023.”

In the rat­ing up­date, Cari­CRIS low­ered Ni­Quan En­er­gy’s rat­ing by one notch to CariBBB+ on the re­gion­al rat­ing scale.

The YouTube record­ing of the in­vestor brief­ing was made pri­vate yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, af­ter the com­ments by El­lis were tran­scribed by Guardian Me­dia.