Apr 2017 Financial News

FCB CEO at annual meeting: APO results out soon

Apr 25, 2017

Chief Executive Officer of state-owned First Citizens Bank (FCB) Karen Darbasie says that the final results for the additional public offering (APO) of shares in the bank will be released to the public shortly.

“We’ve just finished the collation of the data. The audit on some of the rules for participation, as disclosed in the prospectus, has also just been completed which we will be sending across to the shareholder. So we expect within the next couple of weeks that the formal results of the APO will be made public” Darbasie said as she fielded question from the media at the Bank’s Annual General Meeting held at the Hilton Hotel in Port-of-Spain yesterday.

Commenting further on the APO, Darbasie said that a wide cross-section of the public had expressed interest in acquiring shares of the bank.

She said: “We had in excess of 4,000 individual applicants and in excess of 100 pension funds. We had some major institutions increasing their shareholding, but the actual results will come once the audit is complete and the rules of the prospectus are reviewed. There was a substantial number of subscribers.”

On the potential impact to the bank of the latest review by credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) - which led to a downgrade of T&T’s sovereign credit rating last Friday - Darbasie noted that FCB was solidly positioned as a financial institution.

“We expect that our financial results will stand testimony to the strength of the institution. We will wait and see what happens when S&P comes to review First Citizens which is usually done around July. We will be releasing our mid-year results shortly which we believe again will attest to the strength of the institution.” Darbasie said.

For its financial year ended September 30, 2016, FCB recorded after tax profit of $637.2 million, a 1.1 per cent increase from its 2015 after tax figure of $630.4 million.

The group’s total assets grew by 3.4 per cent between 2015 and 2016, moving from $37.5 billion in 2015 to $38.9 billion in 2016.

In March, the bank announced that it would be conducting an additional public offering of 48, 495,665 shares in the bank.

The proceeds from the sale are intended to contribute to the government’s 2017 expenditure.

Source:
?ANDRE WORRELL
Trinidad Guardian
Tuesday April 25, 2017

http://www.guardian.co.tt/business/2017-04-24/fcb-ceo-annual-meeting-apo-results-out-soon