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Lascelles Chin, chairman of the Lasco Group of Companies.Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
The dispute between Kingston businessman Lascelles Chin and his former wife Audrey, a chartered accountant at Sigma Investments Ltd. over the ownership of the shares in Lasco Foods Ltd., is far from over.
Mr. Chin, chairman of the Lasco Group of Companies, has filed an appeal in the Court of Appeal against a Supreme Court ruling last month that Mrs. Chin was entitled to a half of the 250,000 shares in the multi-million distribution company.
In 1993, Mrs. Chin, a chartered accountant at Sigma Investments Ltd., had brought a suit under the Married Women's Property Act, contending that she was entitled to a half of the shares in the company.
Mr. Chin claimed that she was entitled to only one share in the company which began operating in 1986.
Justice Seymour Panton heard the suit and ruled that Mrs. Chin was entitled to only one share.
Mrs. Chin took the matter to the Court of Appeal which ruled that she was entitled to a half of the shares.
Mr. Chin appealed to the United Kingdom Privy Council, Jamaica's final appellate court, which sent back the case to the Supreme Court for the parties to be cross-examined. When Justice Panton heard the suit in the Supreme Court he had asked the parties to give oral evidence but they declined and relied on the documentary evidence.
The parties gave evidence under cross-examination in the Supreme Court last year. Justice Neville Clarke who heard the evidence reserved judgment in May last year until December 6 when he ruled in Mrs. Chin's favour.
Mr. Chin has filed 15 grounds of appeal in which he is contending that the judge erred in his ruling because he based his decision on what he considered discrepancies in Mr. Chin's oral evidence and ignored the contemporaneous documentary evidence and affidavit evidence which supported his case. Mr. Chin claims further that the judge erred in his assessment of Mrs. Chin's evidence on critical and important issues in that he placed no reliance on the fact that she was at all material times a chartered accountant who completed a master programme in accounting and was familiar with how company accounts were structured. The judge's conclusion that Mrs. Chin received much less than her work was worth, was not supported by the evidence, Mr. Chin contends.
