“If earn­ing $130 mil­lion on a $260 mil­lion in­vest­ment in two years is bad then I don’t know what is good.”

This was the state­ment made by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert on Wednes­day as he de­fend­ed First Cit­i­zens Bank’s in­vest­ment in­to Ja­maica-based stock bro­ker­age com­pa­ny Bari­ta In­vest­ments Ltd in the face of con­cerns raised by Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor Wade Mark dur­ing the bud­get de­bate.

Mark ques­tioned why First Cit­i­zens had made an in­vest­ment in­to Bari­ta which he de­scribed as a “bizarre de­vel­op­ment.”

“We are in the dark on this mat­ter and we there­fore call on the min­is­ter to shine a light in the dark cor­ners of this trans­ac­tion,” Mark said.

He al­so called on Im­bert to con­duct an in­ter­nal foren­sic au­dit in­to the trans­ac­tion and to pre­vent First Cit­i­zens from in­vest­ing any more mon­ey.

In re­sponse Im­bert said Mark’s state­ments were “scan­dalous, un­truth­ful,wrong and false.”

Im­bert said First Cit­i­zens has been mak­ing in­vest­ment both re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly with the full sup­port of the gov­ern­ment.

In fact, Im­bert said the on­ly way for lo­cal com­pa­nies to grow is to di­ver­si­fy out­side of the T&T econ­o­my.

“I want to con­grat­u­late FCB for its in­vest­ment in Bari­ta. I want to en­cour­age FCB to con­tin­ue to in­vest in the re­gion as I do al­so en­cour­age all of our Cari­com part­ners to in­vest in T&T,” he said.

Im­bert said Bari­ta is a pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny on the Ja­maica Stock Ex­change.

In fact he said at 44 years old it is the old­est op­er­at­ing stock bro­ker­age com­pa­ny in Ja­maica.