PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

First Cit­i­zen’s Bank has ac­quired Sco­tia­bank’s bank­ing op­er­a­tions in Guyana.

Sco­tia­bank an­nounced the sale of its op­er­a­tions in a press re­lease on Wednes­day whilst al­so stat­ing, “The agree­ment is sub­ject to reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval and cus­tom­ary clos­ing con­di­tions.”

The re­lease said, “This trans­ac­tion sup­ports Sco­tia­bank’s strate­gic de­ci­sion to fo­cus on op­er­a­tions across its foot­print where it can achieve greater scale and de­liv­er the high­est val­ue for cus­tomers. Sco­tia­bank’s cur­rent op­er­a­tions in Guyana en­com­pass four branch­es and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 180 em­ploy­ees. Fol­low­ing clos­ing, all em­ploy­ees will con­tin­ue to sup­port the busi­ness.”

Sco­tia­bank stat­ed in the re­lease, “Un­til reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals are ob­tained and the trans­ac­tion clos­es, Sco­tia­bank’s op­er­a­tions in Guyana will con­tin­ue as usu­al. First Cit­i­zens and Sco­tia­bank will work to­geth­er to fa­cil­i­tate a smooth tran­si­tion for the busi­ness.”

How­ev­er, the an­nounce­ment was met with some be­wil­der­ment by Guyana’s Se­nior Min­is­ter with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Fi­nance Ash­ni Singh, who de­scribed the an­nounce­ment as pre­ma­ture.

“It has just been brought to my no­tice that a press re­lease was is­sued just a few min­utes ago an­nounc­ing the sale of the op­er­a­tions of Sco­tia­bank Guyana to a Re­gion­al Bank, a Trinida­di­an Bank in par­tic­u­lar. I wish to say that the gov­ern­ment of Guyana con­sid­ers it ex­treme­ly un­for­tu­nate,” said Min­is­ter Singh, who ex­plained that un­der Sec­tion 12 of Guyana’s Fi­nan­cial In­sti­tu­tions act such a sale would re­quire the ap­proval of the Bank of Guyana.

“We con­sid­er it pre­ma­ture to an­nounce a trans­ac­tion of this na­ture par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that the reg­u­la­to­ry process to con­sid­er. The re­quest for any such trans­ac­tion is yet to be ini­ti­at­ed much less to be con­clud­ed,” he said.

The Cen­tral Bank of Guyana had pre­vi­ous­ly blocked the sale of Sco­tia­bank to an­oth­er Trinidad and To­ba­go Bank Re­pub­lic Bank Lim­it­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2019.

Should the sale go through, First Cit­i­zens would add to its in­ter­na­tion­al op­er­a­tions which cur­rent­ly are es­tab­lished in Bar­ba­dos, Cos­ta Ri­ca, St. Lu­cia, St. Vin­cent and the Grenadines and T&T.