An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

A new board of di­rec­tors has been elect­ed for the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned First Cit­i­zens Group, fol­low­ing a spe­cial gen­er­al meet­ing yes­ter­day at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA), Port-of-Spain.

The nine-mem­ber board com­pris­es chair­man Shankar Bidaisee, deputy chair­man Dr Ster­ling Frost and di­rec­tors Jo-Anne Boodoos­ingh, Prakash Dhan­ra­jh, Crys­telle Smith, Sandy Roopc­hand, Nichelle Grander­son, Ja­van Lewis and Tri­cia Mc­Neil-Beck­les.

Bidaisee al­so serves as chair­man of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UDe­COTT) and First Cit­i­zens Hold­ings Ltd, which is the hold­ing com­pa­ny for the State’s 60.11 per cent share­hold­ing of the First Cit­i­zens Group.

Ja­son Julien will con­tin­ue in his role as act­ing CEO.

Fol­low­ing the meet­ing, Bidaisee told Guardian Me­dia that the res­o­lu­tion to elect the new di­rec­tors re­ceived over­whelm­ing sup­port from over 200 share­hold­ers at the meet­ing.

“The res­o­lu­tion was car­ried, and most of the share­hold­ers, with the ex­cep­tion of one or two, vot­ed in favour of the board. We are meet­ing im­me­di­ate­ly to chart the way for­ward for the group,” Bidaisee said.

He added that the new board in­tends to main­tain sta­bil­i­ty while dri­ving fur­ther growth across the group’s sub­sidiaries.

De­spite the changes, fol­low­ing the res­ig­na­tion of the pre­vi­ous An­tho­ny Smart-led board, Julien as­sured in­vestors and cus­tomers that First Cit­i­zens re­mains on a sol­id fi­nan­cial foot­ing.

“First Cit­i­zens has been in ex­is­tence for 32 years. We are a pub­licly list­ed, reg­u­lat­ed en­ti­ty, and any­one track­ing the group, es­pe­cial­ly over the last 13 years, would have seen con­sis­tent per­for­mance,” Julien said.

He not­ed that the bank cur­rent­ly has the high­est div­i­dend yield in the mar­ket and one of the strongest cap­i­tal ad­e­qua­cy ra­tios in the re­gion.

Some share­hold­ers who spoke with the Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day said they were pre­pared to give the new board an op­por­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate its lead­er­ship, while oth­ers ex­pressed cau­tious op­ti­mism about the di­rec­tion the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion will take in the com­ing months.