Pe­ter Christo­pher

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Bari­ta In­vest­ments has an­nounced prof­its of $4.1bil­lion Ja­maican dol­lars or USD$26.3 mil­lion for the fis­cal year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2021

In the Ja­maican com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial re­port for the pe­ri­od, Bari­ta’s Chair­man Mark My­ers hailed the per­for­mance of the com­pa­ny giv­en the con­tin­ued chal­lenge of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“De­spite the dif­fi­cult op­er­at­ing en­vi­ron­ment the group pro­duced, net prof­its for the fi­nan­cial year of $4.1 bil­lion. The out­turn for the year was the col­lec­tive re­sult of the tire­less ef­forts of the teams at Bari­ta and Cor­ner­stone with crit­i­cal and un­wa­ver­ing sup­port pro­vid­ed by the boards of di­rec­tors and share­hold­ers of both com­pa­nies,” said My­ers.

He said the year proved piv­otal for the com­pa­ny, as he stat­ed “we made fur­ther tan­gi­ble progress to­wards our ul­ti­mate ob­jec­tive of chang­ing the lives of or­di­nary grass­roots Ja­maicans and Caribbean peo­ple through de­moc­ra­tis­ing wealth and de­liv­er­ing an un­par­al­leled cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence in line with the ob­jec­tives as­sess out in the prospec­tus for our Sep­tem­ber 2020 ad­di­tion­al pub­lic of­fer, much of the year was spent on ad­vanc­ing the group’s ‘Dig­i­tal First’ agen­da, fur­ther ex­pand­ing our pres­ence in the in­vest­ment bank­ing are­na, ex­tend­ing our foot­print across the is­land and es­tab­lish­ing our al­ter­na­tive in­vest­ment plat­form.”

This progress My­ers not­ed was high­light­ed by the over sub­scrip­tion of a Sep­tem­ber 2021 Ad­di­tion­al Pub­lic Of­fer­ing, which My­ers said so­lid­i­fied the com­pa­ny.

“Bari­ta de­cid­ed to re­turn to the cap­i­tal mar­kets for fund­ing and was able to com­plete an­oth­er sig­nif­i­cant Cap­i­tal raise via and over­sub­scribed APO in Sep­tem­ber 2021, which raised an ad­di­tion­al $10.8 bil­lion in per­ma­nent cap­i­tal from over 3,000 sub­scribers,” he said.

“This lat­est cap­i­tal raise is  our fourth suc­cess­ful raise in the last three years and has left the or­gan­i­sa­tion stronger, safer, and more ca­pa­ble to cre­ate dif­fer­en­tial val­ue for our cus­tomers, share­hold­ers staff and the com­mu­ni­ty.”

The Ja­maican trad­ed com­pa­ny has been in the lo­cal news re­cent­ly as State owned First Cit­i­zens is a six per cent eq­ui­ty hold­er in the com­pa­ny hav­ing bought shares through its whol­ly owned sub­sidiary First Cit­i­zens In­vest­ment Ser­vices (FCIS).

It al­so re­cent­ly loaned Cor­ner­stone, a pri­vate group of in­vestors and the ma­jor share­hold­er of Bari­ta US $24 mil­lion which raised eye­brows in T&T and the Par­lia­ment.