Trinidad Cement Limited has reached a deal with the majority of its creditors that gives the producer eight years in which to make good on its outstanding debt.

The package does not include the debts of subsidiaries Readymix West Indies Limited and TCL Packaging Limited, but company secretary Alan Nobie declined to clarify that and other issues relating to the agreement reached eight months after TCL stopped servicing its debts to negotiate a more manageable repayment schedule.

Chairman of Caribbean Cement Company Limited and director of TCL, Brian Young, said the agreement reached covered 75 per cent of creditors and that the cement group will now have to sell the plan to the other 25 per cent.

The rescheduling will have no real impact on Caribbean Cement’s financials, he said, as the negotiated debt programme deals largely with liabilities on TCL’s balance sheet.

Caribbean Cement was exposed to the degree that its assets were used as security for the TCL debt.
Some of that debt was incurred to fund the US$177 million expansion of Caribbean Cement.

TCL, in a public filing at the weekend, said it would resume interest payments in December 2012 on its long- and short-term debt, which at last disclosure amounted to TT$2.67bn at June 2011, of which TT$2.2bn, or 83 per cent, would have become due within a year.