Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd is mak­ing an of­fer to buy out Re­pub­lic Bank (Grena­da) Ltd.

In a no­tice post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change yes­ter­day the bank­ing group, which al­ready has 51 per cent share­hold­ing in that fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, an­nounced that the of­fer doc­u­ment will be mailed out to share­hold­ers on May 9 ahead of the of­fer pe­ri­od which opens on May 11.

Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd, as it was then known, bought its ma­jor­i­ty stake in the for­mer Na­tion­al Com­mer­cial Bank of Grena­da Ltd (NCB) from the Gov­ern­ment of Grena­da in Ju­ly 1992. In April 2006, it was re­named Re­pub­lic Bank (Grena­da) Ltd, in a move de­signed to unite the two banks and greater cap­i­talise on com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tages from sys­tems and process­es align­ment.

The T&T-based bank­ing group, which was orig­i­nal­ly called Colo­nial Bank when it was formed in 1837, is one of the largest and most prof­itable banks in the Eng­lish speak­ing Caribbean with 15 sub­sidiaries and more than 4000 em­ploy­ees in T&T, Grena­da, Bar­ba­dos and Guyana. In 2013, it be­came a ma­jor stake­hold­er on the African con­ti­nent through the ac­qui­si­tion of a 40 per cent stake in HFC Bank (Ghana). In 2015 this stake was in­creased to 57 per cent.

For the fi­nan­cial year end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015, the group's to­tal as­sets stood at $66 bil­lion and prof­it was $1.22 bil­lion–a 2.5 per cent in­crease over 2014.