Bar­bara Jenk­ins

The Re­pub­lic Bank Group has record­ed a net prof­it of $869.1 mil­lion for the third quar­ter end­ed June 30–an in­crease of 1.3 per cent over the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year.Chair­man, Ronald F. deC Har­ford, who an­nounced the re­sults said, "The Group is en­cour­aged by the growth in our to­tal as­sets and loan port­fo­lio of 6 per cent and 8.5 per cent re­spec­tive­ly, over the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2013 and the de­cline in non-per­form­ing loans to 3.6 per cent of to­tal loans."

Har­ford said this is a re­flec­tion of the im­proved per­for­mance in the economies of T&T and Guyana and is tem­pered some­what, by the con­tin­ued weak eco­nom­ic per­for­mance in Bar­ba­dos and the East­ern Caribbean.Com­ment­ing on Re­pub­lic Bank's in­vest­ment in HFC Bank Ghana, Har­ford said: "In April, 2014, as man­dat­ed by the Ghana Code on Takeover and Merg­ers and af­ter ob­tain­ing ap­proval from the Cen­tral Bank of Ghana, the Group sub­mit­ted an Of­fer­or State­ment to HFC Bank Ghana and the Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion (SEC) of Ghana, in which it was an­nounced that Re­pub­lic Bank would make an of­fer to all the share­hold­ers of HFC Bank Ghana to pur­chase the re­main­ing 60 per cent share­hold­ing. This, how­ev­er, is now sub­ject to le­gal chal­lenge be­fore the courts in Ghana."

Har­ford said the Re­pub­lic Bank Group con­tin­ues to pur­sue av­enues to am­i­ca­bly re­solve the mat­ter.He ex­pressed his on-go­ing ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the con­tin­ued sup­port of man­age­ment, staff and cus­tomers of the Re­pub­lic Bank Group and said he ex­pects the Group's per­for­mance to con­tin­ue through­out the last quar­ter of the year.