By McPherse Thompson, Staff ReporterLANCE Hylton, the attorney representing a group of shareholders trying to unseat the current board of Kingston Wharves, said they have been unable to formulate a business plan for its operations because they did not have access to the company's contracts.
"What we have proposed is that we have a meeting where we can see some of those contracts, so we can formulate our plans," said Mr. Hylton, a partner in the firm Myers Fletcher & Gordon, who is among those persons being proposed by the group of shareholders to be elected as a director on Kingston Wharves' board.
He was responding to questions about the plans of the proposed new directors for Kingston Wharves if they get the nod of other shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting, set for February 18 at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston.
Contacted yesterday, Douglas Orane, chief executive officer of Grace, Kennedy & Company, said he could not comment "at this time" on the accessibility of Kingston Wharves' contracts to the group of shareholders in question.
Three shareholders of Kingston Wharves - the Shipping Association of Jamaica Property, Maritime and Transport Services, and Transocean Shipping - have requested the extraordinary general meeting for the purpose of removing eight of the existing directors and replacing them with eight others.
However, Mr. Hylton said that despite what was being presented to the public, even if the minority shareholders were successful in their bid, "they are not looking to throw off all of the Grace directors. They believe that Grace, as a 40 per cent shareholder, has a right to be on the board. So it's a working together." Grace has, in fact, about a 43 per cent stake in Kingston Wharves.
He explained that the extraordinary general meeting was requested because some individuals and companies with interest in Kingston Wharves felt they should have a say in the operation of the company. He said it was a "very simple legal procedure whereby any minority shareholder has a statutory right to offer himself to be a part of the leadership of the company, and to ask the present board to be held to account and to be replaced if the other shareholders or majority share the view that they ought to be replaced."
Those calling for the meeting, he said, involved "a combination of small shareholders who, for some time, have tried to get a voice on the decision-making body of the company and have been refused and have found that the only way to get any say is to basically get together and say, 'well, let's call for a vote'."
Mr. Hylton pointed out that Kingston Wharves was "a huge public company, very big, very important, with over 1,500 to 2,000 shareholders and yet only one shareholder is represented on the board."
However, a source told the Financial Gleaner that last year, the shareholders now trying to have the Kingston Wharves directors replaced were offered four seats on the board, but they did not take up the offer.
The current directors of Kingston Wharves have asserted that the attempt to change the composition of the board was a result of the stevedoring companies wishing to control Kingston Wharves and change a decision made last year to terminate their operations.
However, Hylton Clarke, the owner of A.E. Parnell & Company, one of the stevedoring companies, said that only a few of the minority shareholders had such operations.
The existing directors said there were conflicts of interest that would disqualify certain proposed directors, including Kim Clarke, a son of Hylton Clarke, from seeking office as directors of Kingston Wharves.
