Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (RFHL) and its sub­sidiaries, record­ed prof­its at­trib­ut­able to eq­ui­ty hold­ers of $946 mil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30. This rep­re­sents a de­cline of 22.7 per cent over its 2015 per­for­mance.

In an­nounc­ing the re­sults, RFHL chair­man Ronald F de C Har­ford, ex­plained that, but for three one-off items to­talling $236.9 mil­lion, the group's 2016 per­for­mance would have re­flect­ed a fi­nal prof­it at­trib­ut­able to eq­ui­ty hold­ers of the par­ent of $1.18 bil­lion; 0.7 per cent bet­ter than the com­par­a­tive per­for­mance in 2015. As a re­sult, the board of di­rec­tors de­clared a fi­nal div­i­dend of $3.10 for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30. This brings the to­tal year div­i­dend to $4.35, the same as that paid in the pri­or year. The fi­nal div­i­dend will be paid on De­cem­ber 1 to all share­hold­ers on record as at No­vem­ber 14.

The chair­man iden­ti­fied the three items that ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed the Group's 2016 per­for­mance as a good­will im­pair­ment of $107.3 mil­lion recog­nised on the in­vest­ment in HFC Bank (Ghana) Lim­it­ed (HFC), a loss of $117.8 mil­lion record­ed by HFC, of which RFHL's 57.11 per cent share is $67.8 mil­lion and a $61.8 mil­lion write-down in RFHL's 19.3 per cent stake in East Caribbean Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Lim­it­ed.

With re­spect to the Ghana in­vest­ment, Har­ford said: "The out­look for the Ghana mar­ket and our in­vest­ment re­mains pos­i­tive, as we con­tin­ue our ef­forts to strength­en the gov­er­nance and align its sys­tems and pro­ce­dures to­wards es­tab­lish­ing a plat­form to ben­e­fit from Ghana's fu­ture growth.

"Giv­en the pro­ject­ed growth rates for the Ghana econ­o­my, the sta­bil­i­sa­tion of the ex­change rate, growth in HFC loan and ad­vances on av­er­age of 15 per cent per an­num in the last two years, and op­por­tu­ni­ties in the bank­ing sec­tor, the group projects that per­for­mance will im­prove in the medi­um term."

The chair­man out­lined two strate­gic ini­tia­tives that were com­plet­ed dur­ing the year. The first was the for­ma­tion of RFHL–the um­brel­la com­pa­ny for the group's main bank­ing sub­sidiaries. This hold­ing com­pa­ny struc­ture, es­tab­lished on De­cem­ber 16, 2015, en­abled the bank to seg­re­gate and iso­late the risk among the var­i­ous group com­pa­nies, al­low­ing for a more ef­fi­cient de­ploy­ment of cap­i­tal. The change brought the bank in align­ment with in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice.

The sec­ond took place in the last quar­ter of the fis­cal 2016, when RFHL ac­quired a fur­ther 23.12 per cent share­hold­ing in Re­pub­lic Bank (Grena­da) Lim­it­ed, in­creas­ing the to­tal share­hold­ing from 51 per cent to 74.12 per cent. This larg­er share­hold­ing is in keep­ing with the bank's fo­cus of deep­en­ing its foot­print across the re­gion and cre­at­ing a plat­form for greater op­er­a­tional syn­er­gies across the group.