THREE Jamaican board members of Trinidadian-acquired conglomerate Lascelles deMercado, namely William McConnell, Anthony Bell and Jason Abrahams, are to step down.

Managing Director of Lascelles,William McConnell is credited with doing a fine job, turning the rum division into a world-class outfit and one of the best rum producers in the region.

McConnell joined Lascelles subsidiary J Wray & Nephew as Financial Accountant back in 1973 and has served as Managing Director of Wray & Nephew Group of Companies since 1977. He became Managing Director of Lascelles deMercado in 1990, shortly after the group acquired J Wray & Nephew. He has served as vice-president or secretary of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) for more than twenty years. He is highly respected in the business community and is considered one of the country’s leading business titans.

Anthony Bell served as Group Finance Director, having been with the group for well over two decades. He joined J Wray & Nephew in 1982 and became Managing Director in 1988, moving to become Group Finance Director of Lascelles deMercado in 2002.

His acumen played a vital role in driving the flagship division, namely Rum, Wines & Liquors, into a powerhouse and he oversaw Canada becoming Appleton’s biggest overseas market, overtaking Mexico’s top spot. The prospect of both McConnell and Bell forming a consortium and acquiring the rum division and spinning it off from the Group has been mooted for some time. With its parent company, CL Financial, unable to create a clear direction for Lascelles and finding itself heavily indebted, McConnell and Bell could well fare better and infuse a new dynamism into the company.

Jason Abrahams is a Jamaican investment banker based in Florida. He has been hailed as one of Jamaica’s brightest young stars in the local financial sector before moving on to the premier league in the United States. He is a former senior vice-president of Investments at Prudential Securities and has held senior positions at both Wachovia Securities and Deutsche Bank. He was instrumental in structuring and securing the deal that saw CL Financial subsidiary Angostura acquiring Lascelles back in 2008.

In that year Lawrence Duprey’s CL Financial raised external debt financing in the amount of US$450 million to finance the Lascelles acquisition which amounted to US$676 million. For its money, CL Financial got 86.87 per cent of Lascelles’ common stock.

With Duprey’s group of companies falling asunder in 2009, CL Financial Group’s financial director Michael Carballo intimated at Lascelles AGM that year, that CL Financial might have to turn to Lascelles to finance the US$340-million loan balance it had from the purchase of the Jamaican conglomerate. One of the major problems CL Financial had was the intertwining of assets and its insatiable thirst for cash which served to bedevil the fortunes of Lascelles’ Group of Companies. The financial uncertainty and inability to provide a coherent direction for the Jamaican group may well be a contributory factor in seeing McConnell, Bell and Abrahams heading for the door. In 2010, Lascelles’ third-quarter sales for the period ending June 30 slumped by J$700 million to come in at J$6 billion. Net profit dramatically fell to J$363 million from J$1.39 billion for the same period in 2009.

For the first quarter ended December 31, 2010, Lascelles deMercado reported unaudited consolidated earnings results which saw an operating profit of J$931.1 million and a net profit of J$821.3 million on operating revenues of J$7.1 billion. Lascelles deMercado is expected to report its second quarter 2011 results on May 11th , 2011.