The Financial Services Commission, New Kingston. - File

Rohan Barnett, an attorney who up to this year, worked with the world's largest bank, Citigroup, has been handed the job of running the Financial Services Commission (FSC), Finance Minister Audley Shaw announced Tuesday.

Securities dealers did not imme-diately react to the appointment, saying Barnett's background was unknown to them.

"I am not familiar with him, thus cannot comment at this time," said president of the Jamaica Securities Dealers Association Anya Schnoor.

Barnett, a Jamaican by birth and attorney by profession, takes up his new job on December 1, a year after Bryan Wynter left the agency to take up a new job in Barbados.

Securities sector

George Roper, who was Wynter's chief deputy and pointman on the securities sector, has acted in the top job for the past 10 months.

Yesterday, Shaw made only passing reference to Roper in the final line of the release in an expression of gratitude for having held the reins temporarily.

But later the finance minister settled the question of what was in store for Roper, telling Wednesday Business that he would "return to his substantive post as deputy executive director".

Neither Roper nor FSC chairman Emil George was immediately available, while spokeswoman Nadene Newsome said she has been on leave for a week and unable to assist with comment on the developments.

Barnett was admitted to the New York Bar in 1997, two years after he joined Citigroup. He studied law at the Brooklyn Law School and economics at New York University.

He has worked with Citigroup Global Markets Inc/Smith Barney in New York for 13 years, from 1995 to 2008, joining Citigroup as assistant vice-president and associate general counsel in the litigation unit.

He then worked his way up to senior vice-president and associate general counsel responsible for the oversight of all Smith Barney branches in the Northeast Division of the United States, the ministry said.

Private pensions industries

The FSC - a fairly young institution created by statute in 2001 in response to the financial crisis that crescendoed in the previous decade - monitors and regulates the securities, insurance and private pensions industries.

The latter sector was added to the agency's portfolio in 2004.

The FSC essentially remains a work in progress. Unfinished business remaining includes the drawn out process of pension reform and registration of pension funds under the new law, as well as the unregistered investment schemes, whose operations have been dampened by the spectacular failure of some and legal troubles of others.

Shaw also said that Barnett will be expected "to lead the way in reforming the regulatory system to accommodate a wider range of investment products."

business@gleanerjm.com.