Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The First Cit­i­zens Group has record­ed a prof­it af­ter tax for first six month of the 2020 fi­nan­cial year of $404.4 mil­lion a 2.4 per cent in­crease of 2.4 per when com­pared to same pe­ri­od last year.

For the three-month pe­ri­od end­ed March 31, 2020, the First Cit­i­zens record­ed prof­it af­ter tax of $181.7 mil­lion, but the in­sti­tu­tion’s chair­man An­tho­ny Smart said the im­pact of COVID-19 would be re­flect­ed in the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s third quar­ter re­sults on­wards.

In First Cit­i­zens’ re­port of its fi­nan­cial state­ments, Smart said: “The IMF pre­dicts that the glob­al econ­o­my will shrink by at least three per cent this year. It is clear that this pan­dem­ic will neg­a­tive­ly im­pact the group’s over­all fi­nan­cial per­for­mance from as ear­ly as April 2020 and be­yond.”

Smart al­so ex­plained that the re­cent Stan­dard and Poor’s down­grade of T&T’s Sov­er­eign cred­it rat­ings to BBB- has had a knock on ef­fect on First Cit­i­zens Bank’s rat­ing which is now al­so rat­ed BBB-.

The bank’s chair­man al­so in­di­cat­ed that while there is great un­cer­tain­ty about the du­ra­tion of the pan­dem­ic, the fi­nan­cial sys­tem has al­ready felt a dra­mat­ic im­pact and a fur­ther in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion of the cri­sis could af­fect glob­al fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty.

In spite of this the or­ga­ni­za­tion has di­verged from the de­ci­sion mak­ing stance on div­i­dends that many com­pa­nies have an­nounced. Smart said: “In­ter­na­tion­al­ly and lo­cal­ly, it has been re­port­ed that some com­pa­nies have opt­ed to sus­pend div­i­dend pay­ments be­cause of eco­nom­ic un­cer­tain­ty which they an­tic­i­pate will re­sult in a de­cline in busi­ness gen­er­al­ly.”

He con­tin­ued to note that First Cit­i­zens recog­nised the need for a bal­anced ap­proach out of con­sid­er­a­tion for its share­hold­ers while en­sur­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion­al sus­tain­abil­i­ty; and there­fore has de­cid­ed to de­clare a sec­ond in­ter­im div­i­dend of $0.28 per or­di­nary share.

This brings the to­tal in­ter­im div­i­dend for the six-month pe­ri­od to $ 0.72 per share (cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year was $0.84). The sec­ond in­ter­im div­i­dend will be paid on June 5, 2020 to share­hold­ers on record as at May 21, 2020.

The group’s to­tal as­sets stood at $45.6 bil­lion as at March 2020, which rep­re­sents an in­crease of 5.1 per cent when com­pared to Sep­tem­ber 2019. Smart ex­pressed that the sta­ble per­for­mance for the com­pa­ny’s half year was un­der­pinned by the per­for­mance of the bank­ing op­er­a­tions, sup­port­ed by ex­pense man­age­ment strate­gies.

Smart not­ed that in spite of the sub­stan­tial un­cer­tain­ty which this cri­sis has brought in­to peo­ple’s lives and liveli­hoods, cou­pled with con­trac­tion of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, First Cit­i­zens is com­mit­ted to work­ing with all its cus­tomers through this chal­leng­ing pe­ri­od.