The US$1 bil­lion ten-year bond suc­cess­ful­ly launched by the T&T Gov­ern­ment in New York on Thurs­day is its first in­ter­na­tion­al bond is­sue in three years.

The bond is­sue was for­mal­ly opened to or­ders at 8 am and by 10:30 am, it was more than three times over­sub­scribed, with US$3.5 bil­lion in or­ders re­ceived from more than 250 in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors, thus al­low­ing the coun­try to com­fort­ably raise the tar­get­ted US$1 bil­lion, with prospects for rais­ing ad­di­tion­al amounts in ex­cess of the re­quired US$1 bil­lion, an of­fi­cial re­lease from the Min­istry of Fi­nance stat­ed.

The state­ment con­tin­ued: "The orig­i­nal price for the bond was set at 4.625 per cent. How­ev­er, the sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est and de­mand from in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors but­tressed by strong de­mand from the lo­cal in­vestor com­mu­ni­ty, al­lowed the fi­nal price of the bond to be tight­ened to 4.5 per cent. This pric­ing is re­flec­tive of the con­fi­dence of in­vestors in the Gov­ern­ment's man­age­ment of the econ­o­my and the medi­um term fis­cal and mon­e­tary out­look. The 4.5 per cent in­ter­est cost of the bond com­pares very favourably with re­cent Gov­ern­ment bond is­sues."

The Min­istry re­lease said the pric­ing of the bond fol­lowed a com­pre­hen­sive road­show in the ma­jor world fi­nan­cial cen­tres of Los An­ge­les, Lon­don, Boston and New York over the pe­ri­od Ju­ly 25 to 27. It in­volved one-on-one meet­ings with over 30 tar­get­ted in­vestors in dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions, where pre­sen­ta­tions were made fol­lowed by ro­bust ques­tion-and-an­swer ses­sions on the T&T econ­o­my, rev­enue and ex­pen­di­ture, fis­cal and mon­e­tary pol­i­cy, oil and gas pro­duc­tion, state en­ter­pris­es, macro­eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, for­eign re­serves, debt man­age­ment, man­age­ment of the T&T cur­ren­cy and the ex­change rate, among oth­er things.

The del­e­ga­tion for the road­show was head­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and in­clud­ed the Fi­nance Sec­re­tary, To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, Joel Jack; Ad­vis­er to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and for­mer Gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank Ewart Williams; Per­ma­nent Sec­re­taries in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Mau­rice Suite and Suzette Tay­lor-Lee Chee; two se­nior man­agers of the Cen­tral Bank and as­sis­tant di­rec­tor, Eco­nom­ic Man­age­ment Di­vi­sion, Min­istry of Fi­nance, San­dra Fras­er-James.

The del­e­ga­tion was split in­to two teams, with one team head­ed by Im­bert trav­el­ling to Los An­ge­les and New York and the oth­er team head­ed by Suite trav­el­ling to Lon­don and Boston, with both teams re­join­ing in New York on Thurs­day.

The joint lead man­agers for the bond is­sue were Deutsche Bank and First Cit­i­zens Bank, with FCB's CEO Karen Dar­basie, head­ing the First Cit­i­zen's team who, among oth­er things was charged with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of build­ing the lo­cal in­vestor book, since, in keep­ing with ini­tial ob­jec­tives, a por­tion of the bond was ear­marked for lo­cal in­vestors.

Pro­ceeds of the bond are to be utilised to fi­nance T&T's de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme over the rest of this fis­cal year as well as over the 2017 fis­cal year.