The Na­tion­al In­vest­ment Fund Hold­ing Com­pa­ny has re­port­ed a slight de­cline in the val­ue of its port­fo­lio at the end of fis­cal 2024.

This was re­port­ed by the com­pa­ny’s chair Jen­nifer Lutch­man in the NIF’s an­nu­al re­port for 2024. The re­port was pub­lished on the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change yes­ter­day.

Lutch­man said in her re­port, “We end­ed 2024 with an over­all port­fo­lio of $7.7 bil­lion. Thus, while the div­i­dend per­for­mance has been sig­nif­i­cant, the port­fo­lio has been im­pact­ed by a gen­er­al de­cline in stock mar­ket prices such that the NIF1 port­fo­lio, val­ued in 2018 at $8 bil­lion, is cur­rent­ly $6.90 bil­lion with a cov­er­age ra­tio of 1.8:1.”

In mid-2018, the NIF was es­tab­lished to mon­e­tise cer­tain Cli­co as­sets as well as the whol­ly owned state en­ter­prise, Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU). The ini­tial port­fo­lio was val­ued at $7.941 bil­lion and com­prised shares of An­gos­tu­ra Hold­ings Ltd, One Caribbean Me­dia, Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny and TGU.

Sub­se­quent­ly in Ju­ly 2023, in the con­text of favourable mar­ket con­di­tions, the Se­ries D bond was is­sued to a group of main­ly in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors, and the pro­ceeds used to re­deem the Se­ries A bond.

On Jan­u­ary 22 2024, the $400 mil­lion NIF2 bond was cre­at­ed. It was fund­ed by ap­prox­i­mate­ly four per­cent (4 per cent) of the shares of RFHL, and tar­get­ted at in­di­vid­u­als and small busi­ness­es.

NIF 2 was over­sub­scribed by 267 per cent.

Lutch­man ex­plained, “Since in­cep­tion NIF has paid, on time, thir­teen (13) se­mi-an­nu­al coupon pay­ments amount­ing to $1.3 bil­lion on its NIF1 bonds (Se­ries A, B and C), three (3) semi­an­nu­al coupon pay­ments on its Se­ries Bond D to­tal­ing $129.0 mil­lion and two (2) se­mi-an­nu­al coupon pay­ments amount­ing to $18.0 mil­lion on the NIF2 Bond, to its ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,671 bond hold­ers. The next se­mi-an­nu­al coupon pay­ments to bond hold­ers of Se­ries B and Se­ries C and the NIF2 Bond would be on Au­gust 9, 2025 while or Se­ries D, pay­ment would be ef­fect­ed on Ju­ly 26, 2025.”

The re­port stat­ed the NIF1 bonds (Se­ries A, B and C) were list­ed on the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change on Sep­tem­ber 4, 2018, while list­ing of the NIF2 bond fol­lowed on March 13, 2024.

“The at­trac­tive­ness of these bonds is ev­i­dent from their reg­u­lar trad­ing with ap­prox­i­mate­ly $338 mil­lion and $2.4 mil­lion trad­ed re­spec­tive­ly to date,” Lutch­man said.