Durrant Pate

NCB Financial Group (NCBFG) has seen another attempt to offload a subsidiary fall through, with the latest being its agreement to sell 30.20 per cent of its stake in Bermuda’s Clarien Group to Cornerstone Financial Holdings.

The Jamaica-based regional banking conglomerate has announced that its agreement with Cornerstone for Clarien has expired, with the parties not extending the agreement, which was executed on June 11, 2024. 

This follows last February’s botched sale NCB (Cayman) Limited to Berkeley Financial Holdings, which was terminated due to the transaction not being completed in the stipulated time and in the specific manner as defined under a share purchase agreement.

With the sale of Clarien no longer going through, the entity remains a subsidiary of NCBFG domiciled in Bermuda. It currently owns one of the leading financial institutions in Bermuda, which offers an array of banking, wealth and asset management services and intends to maintain its focus on providing enhanced value to its customers.

NCBFG held an investor briefing in Kingston last week where its CEO, Robert Almeida highlighted that the sale of the Dutch-based insurance company, Thoma Exploitatie BV by the NCBFG-controlled, Trinidad-based subsidiary of Guardian Holdings, went through, noting that the proceeds of that transaction “are actually greater than the sum of the Cayman and the Bermuda transactions”.

Almeida told the briefing that NCBFG has a number of strategies to address its goals, which include increasing the resilience and strengthening the sustainability of the banking conglomerate, admitting that the non-completion of those transactions means NCBFG has to do other things.

The intended sale of NCB (Cayman) and Clarien Group was part of the larger goal of NCBFG  to reallocate capital across the financial conglomerate. NCBFG reported after-tax profit of $22.19 billion for the six months ended March 31, 2025, which is a 187.4 per cent climb from the J$7.72 billion reported for the same period in 2024.