Raphael John-Lall

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai yes­ter­day made it clear that the Cor­po­ra­tion Sole's vote against the re-elec­tion of two First Cit­i­zens Bank (FCB) di­rec­tors and lack of sup­port for the re-elec­tion of two oth­ers, in­clud­ing chair Nyree Al­fon­so, was not due to the fact that they had done any wrong.

He made the com­ment yes­ter­day as spec­u­la­tion swirled over whether Al­fon­so and oth­er di­rec­tors Rishi Bad­daloo, Shobee Jacelon and Mar­lene Ju­man, the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, had been told not to seek re-ap­point­ment at Mon­day's AGM for their role in over­see­ing the now con­tro­ver­sial IPO share sale.Speak­ing to the me­dia at the En­er­gy Cham­ber's Cor­po­rate Gov­er­nance Toolk­it Launch at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Howai as­sured this was not so.

"We did say that this was not in­tend­ed to im­pute any wrong do­ing on the part of any­one," Howai said."The Cor­po­ra­tion Sole felt that there was a need to make changes in light of some of the con­cerns be­ing ex­pressed and we sim­ply pro­ceed­ed on that ba­sis."We are now in the process of look­ing at some pos­si­bil­i­ties in terms of ap­point­ments for the board. We know we must make ap­point­ments that will en­gen­der con­fi­dence in the in­sti­tu­tion and al­low the in­sti­tu­tion to build in­to the fu­ture."

Dur­ing Mon­day's AGM at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing, Vish­nu Dhan­paul, the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, act­ing as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Cor­po­ra­tion Sole, said it did not sup­port the re-elec­tion of ei­ther Al­fon­so or Bad­daloo and vot­ed against the re-ap­point­ment of Ju­man and Jacelon.

Yes­ter­day there was pub­lic de­bate over whether the man­ner in which the Cor­po­rate Sole went about the process was pro­fes­sion­al, not­ing the pub­lic em­bar­rass­ment to the board mem­bers would not en­gen­der any more pub­lic con­fi­dence in the bank's gov­er­nance struc­ture.Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Howai called the of­fi­cers of the Min­istry of Fi­nance "pro­fes­sion­al.""They do their eval­u­a­tion and make their de­ci­sion and you get your ap­provals and move for­ward," he said.

On the way for­ward for First Cit­i­zens, Howai said they were speak­ing to "a few in­di­vid­u­als" at this stage to iden­ti­fy re­place­ments for the board.Howai al­so ad­mit­ted that al­though the FCB IPO was a suc­cess, it was even­tu­al­ly "taint­ed"."It has been very suc­cess­ful and it con­tin­ues to meet a strong and well cap­i­talised in­sti­tu­tion and very prof­itable," Howai said.

"The IPO was a suc­cess but it be­came af­fect­ed and per­haps taint­ed by some of the ac­tiv­i­ties that seem to have tak­en place. We are still wait­ing on the re­sults of the Se­cu­ri­ties Ex­change Com­mis­sion (SEC) Re­view and in­ves­ti­ga­tion which is on­go­ing now and when it comes out then it will be de­ter­mined how one pro­ceeds."The SEC is cur­rent­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing the sale of 659,588 shares to then First Cit­i­zens ex­ec­u­tive Philip Ra­haman at a cost of $14.5 mil­lion.

Fu­ture IPOs have since been put on hold in the wake of the First Cit­i­zens IPO so that process­es can be re­viewed.