Mi­nor­i­ty share­hold­er rights ad­vo­cate Pe­ter Per­me­ll is try­ing to get sup­port for a We-Put-You-Last-IPO protest cam­paign ahead of First Cit­i­zens' an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing on Mon­day. The meet­ing is sched­uled for 10 am at the Lord Kitch­en­er Au­di­to­ri­um, NA­PA, Port-of-Spain.In news­pa­per ad­ver­tise­ments pub­lished over the past few days, Per­me­ll is seek­ing sup­port from the bank's share­hold­ers for his cam­paign. He is lob­by­ing for the re­moval of the cur­rent board of di­rec­tors and is ask­ing the share­hold­ers to con­firm their at­ten­dance at the AGM, which he de­scribes as "a must at­tend event"."Thus far the re­sponse has been over­whelm­ing and the way things are pro­gress­ing this is like­ly to be the moth­er of all AGMs," he said

Per­me­ll told the T&T Guardian the pur­pose of the cam­paign is to "high­light our dis­plea­sure as First Cit­i­zens share­hold­ers with the fact that our board of di­rec­tors con­trary to their much-tout­ed tagline, We put you first, has, in fact, put us last in the re­cent IPO".

"Hav­ing wit­nessed the awe­some pow­er and im­pact of satire on the very pop­u­lar prime time show Sat­ur­day Night Live, we de­cid­ed on the spoof/par­o­dy We-put-you-last-IPO," he said.

Per­me­ll said the AGM should should fo­cus on the IPO is­sue rather than any oth­er mat­ters."We can­not em­pha­sise enough that this an­nu­al meet­ing of share­hold­ers is the on­ly fo­rum that pro­vides share­hold­ers, once per year, with a re­al op­por­tu­ni­ty to for­mal­ly ex­press our con­cerns, ask prob­ing, in­con­ve­nient ques­tions and de­mand sat­is­fac­to­ry an­swers from the board," he said.

Per­me­ll said the share­hold­ers plan to seek clar­i­fi­ca­tion on sev­er­al is­sues, in­clud­ing the month­ly fees paid to First Cit­i­zens di­rec­tors, con­sid­er­ing that they hold mul­ti­ple di­rec­tor­ships with sev­er­al of the bank's sub­sidiaries.He al­so plans to ask: "Why would Ms Nyree Al­fon­so, a prac­tis­ing at­tor­ney-at-law, state cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that as the chair­man of the group and as a lawyer she saw noth­ing out of the or­di­nary in Mr Ra­haman's pur­chas­ing $14.5 mil­lion shares in an IPO, and that there were no breach­es of any reg­u­la­tions, poli­cies or pro­ce­dures, when she had con­duct­ed no au­dit or in­ves­ti­ga­tion of her own and, more im­por­tant­ly, her line min­is­ter had on­ly hours be­fore ex­pressed se­ri­ous con­cerns and or­dered a foren­sic au­dit?

"Why wasn't the pur­chase of the 659,588 shares by the for­mer chief risk of­fi­cer picked up by the cor­po­rate sec­re­tary Sharon Christo­pher (who in­ci­den­tal­ly was the IPO Steer­ing Com­mit­tee chair­man and board mem­ber) at the time of prepa­ra­tion, fi­nal­i­sa­tion and ap­proval of the com­pa­ny's share­hold­er reg­is­ter, nec­es­sary pre­req­ui­sites that would have had to be sat­is­fied by FCB pri­or to list­ing on the T&T Stock Ex­change on Sep­tem­ber 16, 2013?"Per­me­ll said the share­hold­ers al­so want to find out why, even af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai or­dered a foren­sic au­dit of the pur­chase, the bank's cor­po­rate sec­re­tary didn't im­me­di­ate­ly say that Ra­haman had al­ready sold the ma­jor­i­ty of his shares. He said this was one of the ma­jor con­cerns of the pub­lic at the time.An­oth­er ques­tion to be raised is why it took un­til March 12 for the mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar share sale to be made pub­lic.