NICA Meeting

Meeting of Shareholders. On Tuesday 11 September 2007 a historic meeting took place. There were seventeen of us shareholders present on Bob Rogers’ verandah. The meeting was called by Collins Richardson and Bob to discuss what action we should take to protect our investment in the National Investment Company of Anguilla Ltd. It had been struck off the Register of Companies earlier in the year, not for the first time. We had not heard that it had been revived. The directors had called no general meeting of the shareholders for over three years. There had been no news on progress on the preparation of the missing audits for the previous fifteen years. The new Board at the 2004 meeting had promised to complete the audits, and to call another public meeting. They had failed to do so. So far as we were concerned, their term of office had expired. There was no valid Board that we knew off.

We discussed the advertisement we had been hearing on the radio for the previous two days. It was for a clerk for the NICA bookstore. We all know the bookstore had shut down years ago for lack of books to sell or funds to pay staff. Why now the sudden flurry of activity to hire staff? What was the Board up to?

We checked with the Registry of Companies. It turns out that the directors had paid to put the company back on the Register. They had filed the missing Annual Returns. A return is filed after an Annual General Meeting. It is a legal requirement. It sets out who the new Board of Directors are. The directors had simply filed the overdue returns showing themselves as having been re-elected to the Board by the shareholders! Why had they done so? Why are they so anxious to get the loss-making bookstore back up and running? Where had they got the money to start hiring new staff? Had they sold some of the NICA land? Had they leased the Rum Factory? Worst still, could they have secretly sold it? We were full of questions, but had no answers.

The meeting agreed to demand that the so-called Board summon a meeting of the shareholders within fourteen days so that we could be told what was going on. We prepared a letter to the directors and agreed those of us present would all sign it. We also prepared a press release about our meeting so that all other shareholders could know about the actions we were taking.

This state of affairs cannot continue. It is time to bring the abuse of our investments to an end. It is time for the company to be wound up and our funds returned where they rightly belong.