Rédaction Africa Links 24 with Esther FOSSI
Published on 2024-03-14 10:20:46
Workers demand up to thirteen months of unpaid salaries.
The Cotonnière Industrielle du Cameroun is losing its grip year after year. Just after International Women’s Day on March 8th, employees of the Douala branch have been on strike since the morning of March 14th, 2024. They are demanding at least 13 months of salary. Already in difficulty in January 2024, the general manager Edouard Ebah Abada had urgently opened a national call for tenders to recruit a consultant who would carry out a revaluation of the company’s assets in order to avoid dissolution. The revaluation concerned the Douala and Garoua subsidiaries.
This was in order to “present a better financial situation of the equity capital,” explained the general manager in his call for tenders. He then specified that this operation is also aimed at complying with Article 665 of accounting law, which states that: “If dissolution is not pronounced, the company is required, at the latest at the close of the second financial year following the one in which the losses were recorded, to reduce its capital by an amount at least equal to the losses that could not be charged to reserves if, within this period, the equity capital has not been reconstituted to an amount at least equal to half of the share capital.”
This revaluation is part of the solutions proposed in the 2022 report on public enterprises and establishments, which has just been published by the Technical Commission for the Rehabilitation of Public and Parastatal Enterprises (CTR), in order to rebuild the equity capital of Cicam and clean up its balance sheet. The objective is to avoid the dissolution of the country’s largest cotton processing company.
It should be noted that for the past ten years, Cicam has been recording losses due in particular to the obsolescence of its industrial equipment and its loss of competitiveness. Due to this “alarming” financial situation, the equity capital of the company, which has a total debt estimated at 31 billion CFA francs as of December 31, 2022, has become less than half of its share capital. This could have led to the early dissolution of the company in accordance with the Ohada Uniform Act relating to commercial companies and economic interest groupings.
Read the original article(French) on Journal du Cameroun
