Mr. Tatsuya Konoshita, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Group Lease Public Company Limited, revealed “on 4 August 2022, we published our 2020 financial statement delaying 1 and half years. This statement has been delayed as we tried to resolve some issues but now, we have reached a point where we need to inform the public about GL’s performance. 2020 was a tough year due to Covid-19 and mainly an unfavorable court judgement in Singapore. In Singapore, the Court of Appeals found our Singapore subsidiary liable for roughly $71 million, of which we have already paid in full during 2021. The judgement increased our expenses by roughly $21 million in 2020 as the remainder of the judgement was merely an order to repay our existing $50 million CD with JTA.

We will try to get GL on track to trade on the SET again as soon as possible by disclosing our financial statement of 2021 and 2022. We can state that internally we always complete our accounting on time and we are ready to be audited for the years 2021 and 2022. We promise we will be keen to submit anything that will make our auditors to be satisfied. To resume trading of our stock, we need to catch up the disclosure of Financial Statement on time for 2 consequent quarters. We will work on 2021 and 2022 financial statement disclosure as hard as possible.”

Mr. Riki Ishigami, Chief Executive Officer of Group Lease Public Company Limited, stated, “we received the same disclaimer of conclusion from our auditor as we did for 3Q2020. The most important reason from GL for the disclaimer is that KPMG did not get enough satisfactory explanations or evidence in their view for some issues. GL tried it’s best to provide KPMG with as much information as possible and we provided them with many and all documents and items in our possession. We admit there is some information that both KPMG and GL would like to have, but due to circumstances out of our control, both GL and KPMG were unable to get all information requested. Like 3Q2020, rather than wait until we can obtain all information and get a clean opinion from KPMG, we felt it was important for the public to get an update on the performance of the company and for GL to work on being able to trade again on the SET, so we decided to publish financial statement for 2020 knowing that we still have issues to resolve.

KPMG also referred to uncertainly in our legal cases. As stated many times, the legal cases will remain uncertain until the courts decide on the litigation between us and JTA. We will continue to fight JTA the best we can and we remain confident that once the Thai civil case goes to trial, GL will win. We appreciate our shareholders during these times, we will come out stronger from this.

The company had gone through very tough years in 2020 and 2021 under COVID-19 pandemic and as everyone knows the political situation in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and significantly weak local currency in Laos, Myanmar and Sri Lanka had been serious issues for our operations in each country even in 2022. So the result in 2021 which we are going to catch up and release in near future won’t be greatest. However, in 2022 we have already closed our operation in Indonesia which was a negative driver of us because GLF Indonesia was a joint venture with JTrust Group, which is our litigation counter party, so that it won’t have future issues anymore there. Also, in Cambodia and Thailand the companies started to re-expand our business, both of which would be the growth drivers of GL in 2022.”

Mr. Tatsuya Konoshita, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Group Lease Public Company Limited, revealed “back on 11 April 2018, GL filed criminal charges against JTA and 2 JTA Directors: Nobuyoshi Fujisawa and Shigeyoshi Asano (now former Director of JTA), for jointly submitting a petition for business rehabilitation against GL, which falsely claimed that GL falls under the requirements for business rehabilitation. This caused GL to incur reputational damage and lose credibility amongst investors, which negatively affected the value of the shares of the Company. Recently, on 22 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Thailand gave a favorable result to GL when it denied JTA’s application to review the rehabilitation case brought forward by JTA. There is no more appeal for JTA about this and it’s final. We are happy that we can move on and show that JTA’s claim that GL falls under the business rehabilitation state was groundless, and this will give more assurances to the Company’s investors and stakeholders on the Company’s status.”

Mr. Riki Ishigami, Chief Executive Officer of Group Lease Public Company Limited, stated, “while we are happy the Supreme Court ended this saga about GL being rehabilitated, JTA, Nobuyoshi Fujisawa and Shigeyoshi Asano committed criminal acts in our view based on Section 90/80 of the Bankruptcy Act, 1940.  They submitted a false rehabilitation claim to the Bankruptcy Court about GL. The case has been temporarily struck out pending the final judgment of the rehabilitation case. Therefore, on 30 December 2021, GL asked the Central Bankruptcy Court to resume the criminal case against them. The Court has set an appointment to consider the resume of the proceeding on 14 February 2022. Punishment for their crime if this case is successful could be up to THB 300,000 and/or up to 3 years of prison and we will seek justice for our shareholders by chasing JTA and their Directors individually to make them compensate for the loss they created for GL and our shareholders and also make them face the consequences of their actions in criminal cases. In Thailand, it is the Central Bankruptcy Court which hears criminal complaints regarding false rehabilitation claims. This is the same court which ruled in GL’s favor that GL does not fall under the requirements for business rehabilitation.  

Additionally, I want to add that GL still has an active civil claim against JTA for THB 9.13 billion due to damage they caused GL and GL’s shareholders and we are appealing a Court of Appeals decision which took away THB 685.5 million that the Court originally awarded GL due to JTA’s harmful bankruptcy court actions. In our Supreme Court Appeal for the THB 685.5 million, we will include the Supreme Court’s rejection of JTA’s business rehabilitation appeal.