Pula Steel denies attachment of property
Onalenna Kelebeile | Friday November 18, 2016 14:53
However, the company’s corporate services director, Brian Mosenene said that none of their company property has been attached, but disclosed that the vehicles were kept somewhere for security reasons because they had an issue with a security company that guarded the company premises.
“It is true that we owe some of our suppliers and six of them have taken us to court over our debts and we appeared before court to defend ourselves because we were served with papers. We presented before court our intentions to clear off the debts and we have since been ordered by the court to work out the terms of payments because we are not denying that we owe them,” Mosenene said.
He added that they have observed that some creditors fear that the closure of BCL mine may affect Pula Steel somehow. “I believe they lack understanding of the relationship between Pula Steel and BCL mine. We are committed to paying each one of them and we will do so,” he said. Mosenene added that the highest debt they have with suppliers is around P600,000, but could not disclose how much in total the company owes creditors.
He added the issues with the creditors emanate from the fact that the company cannot afford to pay at the pace at which creditors expect because of slow production. “Our production is erratic. When we started to generate funds the company was forced to close down for two months by the Department of Pollution Control and this disrupted most of our plans,” he said. He however said production is currently slowly ramping up and they are awaiting working capital that has already been finalised from the Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA). He added that the funds have already been approved.