PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dave Tan­coo is not con­cerned by the drop in share prices of state-owned bank First Cit­i­zens.

The price of the stock had dropped from $42 in April and has been hov­er­ing in the mid to low $30s for the past few weeks, prompt­ing for­mer Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert to ques­tion if the price was be­ing ma­nip­u­lat­ed.

Tan­coo, when asked about the mat­ter af­ter de­liv­er­ing a speech on day 2 of the An­nu­al In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance and Ac­count­ing Con­fer­ence (AIFAC-2025), host­ed by the In­sti­tute of Char­tered Ac­coun­tants of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ICATT) at the Hy­att Re­gency on Fri­day, did not find the de­vel­op­ment un­usu­al.

He said, “I have fo­cused a lot on the bank­ing sec­tor over my pe­ri­od of time, both in of­fice and be­fore, and I un­der­stand that share prices go up and go down based on na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al events. It’s part of the sys­tem. It will go up and it will go down, I as­sure you, it will go back up.”

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter was al­so asked about the ap­par­ent de­lay in the is­su­ing of tax re­funds to cit­i­zens who had sub­mit­ted their tax re­turns.

Sev­er­al mem­bers of the pub­lic who com­plet­ed their fil­ings had not­ed they were yet to re­ceive their re­turns.

To this query the min­is­ter said, “Ex­cel­lent ques­tion. My re­sponse will be, stay tuned. More is com­ing.”

Ear­li­er, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter re­it­er­at­ed plans for a $1 bil­lion Na­tion­al In­vest­ment Fund bond to be rolled out be­fore the end of the year. He said the fund would in­clude com­mer­cial prop­er­ties.

“These mea­sures will trans­form pub­lic as­sets in­to pub­lic op­por­tu­ni­ties, “ said Min­is­ter Tan­coo at the podi­um for the event. While he did not go in­to sig­nif­i­cant de­tails when asked about the planned roll out, he point­ed out that there had been two pre­vi­ous NIF bond ex­e­cu­tions.

In 2018, a NIF Bond, which in­clud­ed stocks in Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd, One Caribbean Me­dia, West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny An­gos­tu­ra Hold­ings Ltd and Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed, were ini­tial­ly of­fered in five-year, 12-year and 20-year tranch­es.

In Jan­u­ary 2024, The NIF 2 bond was launched backed by 6,546,417 shares of Re­pub­lic Bank Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL). Both NIF bonds were over­sub­scribed.