I hope there is not a story in 3 months about these Columbians being investigated by SEC and the FBI and Scotland Yard. I really hope we've done our due diligence and have actually spoken to the aforementioned agencies and not just done a google search or looked at the most recent watch list.

You have no idea what this means for banking in the Bahamas. RBC and BNS will be redoubling their efforts to dispose of their banking operations in the Bahamas as quickly as possible, and who can blame them.

*Repost:*

The Gilinski group is based in Colombia and we all know that much of that country's economy is driven by Latin American drug cartels. CIBC selling out to a Colombian based financial group is a huge slap in the face of the Minnis-led FNM government, and a monumental betrayal of the Bahamian people. It's all too obvious that CIBC and the Gilinski group sensed great weakness in the Minnis-led FNM government and decided to strike while the iron was hot. Conducting financial business in the Bahamas will now be synonomous with conducting financial business in Colombia....and we all know what that means for the Bahamas in the eyes of the FATF, the OECD, etc. etc. The other financial institutions in the Bahamas are now going to have even greater difficulty establishing and maintaining correspondent banking relationships with other financial instutions abroad, especially in the U.S. and Canada.

And are the non-CIBC related minority shareholders of FCIB going to be forced to live with a Colombian based partner who was unwilling to extend to them the very same favouable control buy-out terms that were offered to CIBC? Surely this cannot be fair treatment of FCIB's minority shareholders!

Nope. This has nothing to do with local politics today, or even the Bahamas at all currently. Nothing can save us now. Several years ago, I was employed by their wealth management group (CIBC). At a performance review of mine, where a Toronto executive sat in, I outlined my career goals and educational requirements to meet those goals. My Bahamian manager nodded politely. That night, I joined the Toronto executive for a few drinks. He told me that my career options were limited in terms of what I wanted to do, and my best bet would be to find another bank. I did exactly that. Canadian banks were no longer returning the profits that they did in the heady days prior to FATCA, the FATF and the OECD, and even in those days, it was quietly being shopped around. The risk associated with banking in the Caribbean multiplied with the shrinkage of international business and the growth of Latin American business that was fraught will problems of all kinds. The next bank that I joined, also sold their book of business, and thankfully I ended up with their international parent, out of the Caribbean jurisdictions. Nobody wants to do correspondent banking business with the IBC model that the Bahamas and other tax havens have, for fear of fines of hundreds of millions of dollars. We could have saved ourselves 20 years ago by changing course and becoming involved in merchant, commercial, capital markets and investment banking in full compliance, but we didn't. The Cayman Islands did, and their banking sector saw a 7.2% growth, whereas ours has declined miserably. Ironically, when PLP PM CriscoButt came into power, he commissioned Brian Moree to do a report to revive our financial sector, and the Bahamas banking industry excoriated him for daring to even suggest the things that might have saved us.
We are our own worst enemies. We are backwards in our banking technology and our thinking. We had to chase dirty Latin American money because everything else dried up.
The benchmark standard for ROE (Return on Equity) is 11.2 % world wide, and the Bahamian operations are a dismal fraction of that. Nothing to do with the current government. The blame, like everything else retrograde in this country belongs to the PLP.

They’ll come for you with torches and pitchforks in here for weighing in with an informative, articulate response that you can actually back up with personal knowledge.

banker, thanks for taking the time to explain your point of view.

I see a big market coming back for those cash counting machines! Duffle bags are also selling out in Columbia in anticipation of a new market opening up for them.
We will soon hear about a direct flight coming online from Columbia to Nassau.

Direct Bahamasair cargo flights to Cali, Medellín and Bogotá are no doubt being explored by D'Aguilar. ROWL

Canadian Banks are divesting themselves of their caribbean subsidiaries because its all about declining profit margins and the never ending legislative changes required by the likes of the FFATF and the OECD, is not helping the situation. This coupled with the fact that the entire caribbean central America area is ground zero with the effects of change. The possibility of Cat 5 hhurricanes like Dorian wrecking the economies of one or more caribbean island state is a real possibility every year. This will result in stagnant to negative GDP growth rates in most countries in this hemisphere and continued losses for the Canadian banks and they have realized this long ago
Colombia’s GNB Financial Group is doing what any prudent investor would do and that is to spread their investment portfolio as far and wide as possible and because It is easier to get into the Caribbean which does not have the very strict requirements and scrutiny for entry as would be the case for entry into the United states banking market.
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If any one is responsible for all this?? it has to be the FNM Papa who changed the
banking laws
.

What you don't understand birdie, is that the banking laws were changed to save what little we have. You would see this if you put aside your partisan spectacles and looked at the whole picture through the eyes of logic and reason. Because Hubigetty didn't go far enough, we are in trouble.