Dix­ie-Ann Dick­son

Share­hold­ers of ANSA McAL Ltd yes­ter­day ap­proved the ad­di­tion of for­mer Citibank ex­ec­u­tive Steve Bideshi as a di­rec­tor on the com­pa­ny's board. Bideshi's ap­point­ment was an­nounced yes­ter­day at the ANSA McAL group's 83rd an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing, at Tatil Build­ing, Port-of-Spain. Bideshi served on the CL Fi­nan­cial board be­tween June 12, 2009 and Jan­u­ary 31, 2010 when he re­signed. He was al­so the CL Fi­nan­cial CEO dur­ing that pe­ri­od.

At Citibank in 1995 Bideshi was se­lect­ed as chief coun­try of­fi­cer of T&T. Bideshi, who served at the Citibank for 28 years was very in­stru­men­tal in ex­pand­ing the Bank's foot­print to in­clude Ba­hamas, Bar­ba­dos and the East­ern Caribbean, where he served as a di­vi­sion ex­ec­u­tive for the Turkey branch in 2004.

Af­ter build­ing the T&T fran­chise in­to the most prof­itable cor­po­rate bank­ing busi­ness in Latin Amer­i­ca and Brazil, he achieved sim­i­lar re­sults in Turkey. He built Citibank Turkey and oth­er parts of the fran­chise in­to the sec­ond most prof­itable ge­o­graph­ic re­gion af­ter Africa Di­vi­sion. He is cur­rent­ly the head of Be­spoke Cap­i­tal, a bou­tique ad­vi­so­ry firm spe­cial­is­ing in cor­po­rate fi­nance and li­a­bil­i­ty man­age­ment. Pri­or to Bideshi's ap­point­ment, Ger­ry Brooks, ANSA McAL's chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer de­clared a prof­it be­fore tax of $904.8 mil­lion, which he said was the strongest per­for­mance of the Group and the "the best re­gion­al con­glom­er­ate per­for­mance." "Against the back­drop of a very dif­fi­cult in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment, I am pleased to re­port an­oth­er god year, in which your Group record­ed rev­enue of $5.267 bil­lion," he said. "The high­est lev­el of rev­enue in the Group's his­to­ry."

Brooks said the com­pa­ny would con­tin­ue to in­vest and is de­lib­er­ate­ly fo­cus­ing on new growth poles. He said the Group ac­quired the Tri­mart chain of su­per­mar­kets in Bar­ba­dos, the BMW dis­tri­b­u­tion line and is study­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing a US$300 mil­lion in­vest­ment in ethanol, where a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing was signed with the Guyanese gov­ern­ment in Feb­ru­ary. Re­sults of this fea­si­bil­i­ty study, he said should be com­plet­ed in the fourth quar­ter of 2012. In or­der to fa­cil­i­tate a more com­pet­i­tive and en­abling en­vi­ron­ment for busi­ness­es and the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, Brooks called on the Gov­ern­ment to im­ple­ment the Bev­er­age Con­tain­er Bill and the build­ing code plan.