FINANCES OF THE COMPANY.
The Company has now paid a full year's dividends on its Preference Shares for last year, but the dividends on the 6 per cent. " A " Cumulative Preference Shares are still eighteen months in arrear, and with regard to this matter the . Chairman said that, unless unforeseen circumstances arose, there was no reason to anticipate that dividend pay- ments on these Shares would fall further into arrear. . He was sure, however, that shareholders would agree, having regard especially to ;he financial difficulties inherited from a former regime and from which the Company was only now emerging, that it was essential to conserve and strengthen their resources. Moreover, the Chairman referred to certain factors making a thoroughly sound financial policy the more imperative. There was, he said, the serious disparity existing between the book value of investments and their actual value, a disparity not to be ignored in view of the impending winding up of some of the companies in which the Union-Castle have large invest- ments, for this would make it necessary to deal with the resulting deficit. -
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