It is good that the board and management of First Citizens acted before being pushed to do so against its chief risk officer, showing him the door before the Finance Minister and the Cabinet had the opportunity to decide after reading the report on the investigation into the shares transaction. The chairman of the board, Nyree Alfonso, was put in an awkward position, having first defended Rahaman and then being part of the decision to dismiss him.
The board and the management must be commended for being able to change their minds when they got more facts surrounding the purchase and sale of the shares from the IPO by Phillip Rahaman.
One side of the story that emerged last week on the CNC3 Business Watch segment with Judy Kanhai was that the representing union, BIGWU, had urged the staff of FCB not to buy any shares in the IPO because of its ideological position against privatisation. The fear of the union was that if staff got into financial difficulties, they would sell their shares and thus, in effect, the bank would be privatised.
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