Nadaleen Singh

First Cit­i­zens Group CEO Karen Dar­basie was praised yes­ter­day for steer­ing the bank through the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing its ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing (IPO).

The prais­es came from chair­man An­tho­ny Smart as Dar­basie presided over her first an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing since be­ing ap­point­ed to the top post at the State owned fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion. The meet­ing was held at the Trinidad Hilton and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

Smart told share­hold­ers Dar­basie had ful­filled the board's ex­pec­ta­tions com­plete­ly.

"We as a fam­i­ly at First Cit­i­zens were in the news for all the wrong rea­sons. As it has be­come ob­vi­ous, the bank set­tled down to func­tion­ing as an ef­fec­tive and suc­cess­ful fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion away from the hot lights of me­dia con­tention," he said.

When Dar­basie took up the post last year, First Cit­i­zens was still mired in con­tro­ver­sy over then pur­chase and sale of 656,688 bank shares in its IPO by for­mer chief risk of­fi­cer Philip Ra­haman. Ra­haman pur­chased the shares from the em­ploy­ee buck­et at the bankand they were lat­er sold to his rel­a­tives and five com­pa­nies from the Ra­haman fam­i­ly-con­trolled Ra­hamut Group.

Com­ment­ing on the group's fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, Smart said First Cit­i­zens had achieved prof­it af­ter tax of $630.4 mil­lion. This rep­re­sent­ed 0.6 per cent growth year-on-year, he said.

Dar­basie told share­hold­ers the group's to­tal as­sets–in­clud­ing pro­ceeds from the $2.7 bil­lion Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) IPO–amount­ed to $37.5 bil­lion at year end. She said there was sig­nif­i­cant growth in cus­tomer loans and the in­vest­ments port­fo­lios of 24 per cent and 15.8 per cent re­spec­tive­ly.

"The as­set man­age­ment com­pa­ny has in­creased as­sets un­der man­age­ment from $13.9 bil­lion to $15.3 bil­lion and it's prof­it be­fore tax from $95.8 mil­lion to $111.9 mil­lion," she said.

Dar­basie said the trustee com­pa­ny had fo­cused on stream­lin­ing its op­er­a­tions and in­creas­ing its rev­enue gen­er­at­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ty with fee in­come in­creas­ing from $36.1 mil­lion to $39.8 mil­lion in 2015. First Cit­i­zens In­vest­ment Ser­vices con­tributed $131.1 mil­lion to the group's prof­it be­fore tax.