Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

CL Fi­nan­cial Lim­it­ed is sell­ing its 94.24 per cent share­hold­ing in COLFIRE.

Colfire was pre­vi­ous­ly list­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert as one of the as­sets that CL Fi­nan­cial could sell to re­pay its $30 bil­lion debt to tax­pay­ers.

“The di­vest­ment of (Colfire) will be struc­tured as the sale of CL Fi­nan­cial Ltd’s 94.24 share­hold­ing on an as is where is ba­sis. Of­fers will on­ly be con­sid­ered for the 94.24 per cent share­hold­ing of (Colfire),” a no­tice stat­ed.

Colo­nial Fire In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed was in­cor­po­rat­ed in 1955 by the late Cyril Duprey.

In 1958 it com­menced op­er­a­tions in Port-of-Spain as a small spe­cialised com­pa­ny of qual­i­fied un­der­writ­ers.

The com­pa­ny’s name was amend­ed in 1968 to Colfire to in­clude all ser­vices in prop­er­ty, mo­tor, li­a­bil­i­ty, ma­rine and oth­er in­sur­ance lines.

Colfire is stat­ed to have some 85,000 cus­tomers.

Ac­cord­ing to the As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go In­sur­ance Com­pa­nies (AT­TIC) in 2018 Colfire was ranked third in the lo­cal gen­er­al in­sur­ance mar­ket record­ing $282 mil­lion in gross writ­ten pre­mi­ums.

Colfire claimed 17 per cent of the lo­cal Mo­tor In­sur­ance mar­ket.

Over­all, Colfire was re­port­ed to have $309 mil­lion in as­sets in 2018.

Last De­cem­ber the Caribbean In­for­ma­tion and Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vice (Cari­CRIS) for the fourth suc­ces­sive year gave Colfire a Cor­po­rate Cred­it rat­ing of CariA (For­eign and Lo­cal cur­ren­cy Rat­ings) on the re­gion­al scale and ttA on the Trinidad and To­ba­go Na­tion­al Scale.

“The sta­ble out­look is based on our ex­pec­ta­tion that Colfire will con­tin­ue to main­tain prof­itable op­er­a­tions and ad­e­quate cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion, de­spite the chal­lenge eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances aris­ing from the coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) pan­dem­ic. More­over, the Com­pa­ny is ex­pect­ed to main­tain its strong mar­ket po­si­tion and Good cred­it qual­i­ty of fi­nan­cial as­sets over the next 12-15 months,” Cari­CRIS stat­ed.

Prospec­tive buy­ers are asked to email www.cfg­i­clsale.com in or­der to ac­cess more de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about the process per­tain­ing to the sale as well as the as­so­ci­at­ed Non-Dis­clo­sure Agree­ment.