Fi­nance and the Econ­o­my Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai says there will be no cov­er-up in the First Cit­i­zens IPO in­ves­ti­ga­tion and that the in­ves­ti­ga­tions will be tak­en to "their log­i­cal con­clu­sions."He said so while wind­ing up de­bate in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day on a gov­ern­ment mo­tion for the adop­tion of the Re­port of the Spe­cial Se­lect Com­mit­tee, ap­point­ed to con­sid­er and re­port on the Se­cu­ri­ties (Amend­ment) Bill.

The re­port was not on­ly adopt­ed but al­so unan­i­mous­ly passed with the sup­port of all 28 Gov­ern­ment, Op­po­si­tion and In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors present.Two in­ves­ti­ga­tions were com­mis­sioned fol­low­ing pub­lic out­rage over the mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar pur­chase and re­sale of First Cit­i­zens shares by its then chief risk of­fi­cer Phillip Ra­haman.The probes are seek­ing an­swers on Ra­haman's pur­chase of 634,588 shares from the un­der sub­scribed buck­et of shares of­fered to the bank's em­ploy­ees in Feb­ru­ary when the IPO was launched.

Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers (PwC) com­plet­ed its foren­sic in­ves­ti­ga­tions at the be­gin­ning of April and it was sub­se­quent­ly pre­sent­ed to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan.Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Lester Hen­ry told leg­is­la­tors the probe be­ing con­duct­ed by the SEC "ap­pears to be go­ing nowhere."Hen­ry asked Howai to say if lawyers for those in­volved in the mat­ter have suc­ceed­ed in stalling the SEC probe.

He said he was in­formed the mat­ter was in fact be­ing stymied by at­tor­neys for the peo­ple in­volved be­cause of ac­tions they were tak­ing in the mat­ter. Hen­ry did not elab­o­rate.He said an ex­pla­na­tion must be giv­en on why it was tak­ing so long to com­plete and that there must be trans­paren­cy in the process.