The Cli­co In­vest­ment Fund (CIF) will be list­ed on the lo­cal stock ex­change on Jan­u­ary 7 and will be­gin trad­ing on the same day, the T&T Stock Ex­change an­nounced yes­ter­day. The sym­bol for the Fund will be CIF and the units in it will be list­ed at a price of $25 and will be trad­ed in the mu­tu­al fund mar­ket.

Ini­tial­ly, the Gov­ern­ment had hoped that the units would be­gin trad­ing on the lo­cal stock mar­ket on Jan­u­ary 2, but the pro­cess­ing and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of the unithold­er ac­counts was prov­ing to be more time-con­sum­ing than ex­pect­ed, two of­fi­cials con­nect­ed to the is­sue said yes­ter­day. Yes­ter­day as well, the Min­istry of Fi­nance placed a no­tice on its web site in which it con­firmed an ear­li­er Guardian re­port that bond­hold­ers who did not con­vert to units in the CIF be­fore De­cem­ber 14, will be able to con­tin­ue do­ing so from Thurs­day Jan­u­ary 3.

The Min­istry of Fi­nance no­tice stat­ed that Cli­co bond­hold­ers who missed the De­cem­ber 14 dead­line will have to pay a trans­fer fee of $45 and a bro­ker­age com­mis­sion of $300 per trans­ac­tion. The CIF is the mech­a­nism by which the Gov­ern­ment is al­low­ing hold­ers of ze­ro-coupon Gov­ern­ment bonds for years 11 to 20 to ex­change those bonds for units in the CIF.

About 50 per cent of the hold­ers of short-term in­vest­ment prod­ucts is­sued by Cli­co and British Amer­i­can (Trinidad) who were el­i­gi­ble to con­vert their 11 to 20-year ze­ro-coupon bonds in­to units in the CIF, the Guardian re­port­ed in an ar­ti­cle pub­lished on De­cem­ber 21. There were 13,070 po­ten­tial re­cip­i­ents and of that amount 6,582 bond­hold­ers, rep­re­sent­ing 50.35 per cent of the to­tal ac­cept­ed the of­fer by the De­cem­ber 14 dead­line, Karen Yip Chuck, the gen­er­al man­ag­er of Re­pub­lic Bank's Trust and As­set Man­age­ment di­vi­sion told the Guardian.

Ac­cord­ing to the no­tice: "Gov­ern­ment is now the hold­er of all the un­sub­scribed units in the CIF and is will­ing to trade these units on­ly with those bond­hold­ers who missed the dead­line of De­cem­ber 14. Hold­ers of the 11 to 20 bonds will be able to con­tin­ue con­vert­ing their bonds in­to units for the next ten years.

For le­gal rea­sons, the bonds-for-units of­fer was ini­tial­ly not made to non-res­i­dents of T&T, but since the close of the of­fer on De­cem­ber 14, the Gov­ern­ment has re­ceived ap­provals from the reg­u­la­tors in Guyana, the Cay­man Is­lands and Cana­da for the units to be of­fered to the res­i­dents of those coun­tries.

The CIF is a closed-end mu­tu­al fund, which will be cap­i­talised with an as­set val­ue of $5.1 bil­lion. The ini­tial in­vest­ments in the Fund were 40,072,299 Re­pub­lic Bank shares, which were val­ued at $4.397 bil­lion as at No­vem­ber 1 and gov­ern­ment bonds val­ued at $703 mil­lion, which will pay out a coupon of 4.25 per cent over 25 years.