PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – Finance Minister Colm Imbert has described as a “tremendous success” the recent National Investment Fund’s (NIF) multi-million dollar five-year bond issue, even as the Opposition said the announcement is “a theatrical distraction from the economic, environmental and national security crisis caused by the oil spill in Tobago.”
In a statement, Imbert said that the data so far on the recent NIF2 TT$400 million (One TT dollar=US$0.16 cents) five-year bond issue, which was offered to the public at an interest rate of 4.5 percent per annum, shows that it “ has been a tremendous success.
“NIF2 was designed to provide all citizens with a safe and high-value investment instrument, using the people’s assets acquired from Colonial Life Insurance Company (CLIC). As of yesterday, the total applications for the TT$400 million available in NIF2 bonds had crossed one billion dollars inclusive of over TT$700 million in applications from 3,644 individual investors, with more applications to be tallied today”.
Imbert said that NIF2 has been oversubscribed by 160 percent, and when the final tally is done, the over-subscription may cross 170 percent.
“The success of NIF2 is an overwhelming vote of confidence in the National Investment Fund and, by extension, a vote of confidence in the Government’s management of the assets acquired by the government in return for the money spent in the CLICO bailout.”
Imbert said that since inception, NIF has paid all semi-annual interest due on all NIF bonds on time and paid bondholders in full for the first five-year Series A NIF bonds when they matured in August 2023.
Imbert said that after the winding up in 2023 of the CLICO Investment Fund (CIF), which was backed by 25 percent of the issued shares in Republic Financial Holdings Limited (RFHL), NIF acquired a further 3.9 percent in RFHL, taking it to 29.9 percent of RFHL. These additional shares in RFHL were the basis for NIF2.
“It is noteworthy that when NIF bonds were first issued in 2018, they were unjustifiably described by the Leader of the Opposition as a “Ponzi Scheme,” the Opposition went so far as to urge its supporters not to invest in NIF1. That attempt to damage NIF1 failed since that first bond issue was also oversubscribed.
“Now that experience has demonstrated that NIF1 was a great investment, providing a return three times the typical deposit rate at commercial banks, NIF2, with a similar desirable interest rate for individual investors, has been a galloping success,” Imbert said.
But in a statement, the opposition spokesman on finance, Dave Tancoo, said that on the last occasion Imbert “boasted of the NIF being oversubscribed, it was eventually revealed that the National Insurance Board, over which the Minister has complete control, had been directed to invest one billion dollars into the NIF.
“Just to be clear, these companies belong to taxpayers, and any revenue they generated would have gone into the consolidated fund as revenue to the country. Instead, three-quarters of the NIF returns have benefitted private hands. Interestingly, the timing of the Minister’s announcement comes immediately before he goes to the Parliament to create space to borrow 10 billion dollars more,” Tancoo said.
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