Chair­man of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), Vin­cent Pereira, has an­nounced that the Group record­ed prof­it at­trib­ut­able to its eq­ui­ty hold­ers of $400.2 mil­lion for the three months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2022.

This rep­re­sents an in­crease of $4.4 mil­lion or 1.10 per cent over the $395.9 mil­lion re­port­ed in the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od of the last fi­nan­cial year.

To­tal as­sets stood at $113.6 bil­lion at De­cem­ber 31, 2022, an in­crease of $1.6 bil­lion or 1.45 per cent over the to­tal as­sets at De­cem­ber 2021.

This in­crease was fu­elled by growth in cus­tomer de­posits across our sub­sidiaries in T&T, Guyana, Bar­ba­dos, the East­ern Caribbean, and Suri­name, the bank ex­plained in a re­lease.

In an­nounc­ing the re­sults Pereira said, “The Group’s first quar­ter re­sults re­flect the strong per­for­mance of our US dol­lar-de­nom­i­nat­ed sub­sidiaries in the Cay­man Is­lands and the British Vir­gin Is­lands be­cause of the ris­ing in­ter­est rate en­vi­ron­ment, to­geth­er with the con­tin­ued re­cov­ery in most of our Caribbean sub­sidiaries.”

He added these gains were off­set by a spe­cif­ic cred­it loss aris­ing out of the Gov­ern­ment of Ghana’s re­struc­tur­ing of its do­mes­tic and in­ter­na­tion­al debt, a con­di­tion of that coun­try’s De­cem­ber 2022 “staff- lev­el agree­ment” with the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund for a three-year US$3 bil­lion ex­tend­ed cred­it fa­cil­i­ty.

“This cred­it loss negat­ed the oth­er­wise strong op­er­at­ing per­for­mance of our sub­sidiary in Ghana. The over­all net im­prove­ment does high­light the val­ue of the Group’s in­ter­na­tion­al di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion strat­e­gy and the re­silience of our op­er­a­tions,” Pereira added.

He said the bank re­mains con­fi­dent that the un­der­ly­ing strength of the group will en­able it to con­tin­ue to man­age any chal­lenges ahead.