To­ba­go is one step clos­er to re­tain­ing its in­ter­na­tion­al glob­al cred­it rat­ing. This fol­lows a meet­ing be­tween team from the Fi­nance and En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment Di­vi­sion of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) led by Sec­re­tary Joel Jack and Moody's In­vestor Ser­vices rep­re­sen­ta­tives Rox­ana Munoz and Adri­an Javier Garza.

The meet­ing at the Vic­tor E. Bruce Fi­nan­cial Com­plex was to com­plete the fi­nal phase of a rat­ings ex­er­cise. The dis­cus­sions which start­ed last year will con­clude in the next few weeks with as­sign­ment of a cred­it rat­ing for the is­land.

"This rat­ing will go a long way, boost­ing in­vestor con­fi­dence and ad­vanc­ing the THA's de­vel­op­ment plans for the is­land as set out in the Com­pre­hen­sive Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Plan (CEDP). It will pro­vide the As­sem­bly with greater ac­cess to the cap­i­tal mar­ket where it can in­de­pen­dent­ly source funds for pri­or­i­ty projects to sus­tain growth on the is­land," Jack ex­plained.

"This has be­come even more crit­i­cal giv­en the sit­u­a­tion with the en­er­gy sec­tor. De­creas­ing oil prices and the con­tin­u­ous chal­lenges with cen­tral gov­ern­ment al­lo­ca­tions will soon be ap­pro­pri­ate­ly ad­dressed through the util­i­sa­tion of al­ter­nate mod­els for fund­ing for As­sem­bly projects in­clud­ing Pub­lic Pri­vate Part­ner­ships oth­er sim­i­lar mech­a­nisms."

In or­der to se­cure the rat­ing, which the Moody's team has in­di­cat­ed will be pos­i­tive, the THA has been sub­ject to in­tense scruti­ny of its fi­nan­cial op­er­a­tions in­clud­ing ex­am­i­na­tion of its in­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work, its sources of in­come, the per­for­mance of rev­enues of the THA, ex­pen­di­ture trends in­clud­ing the evo­lu­tion of its re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture, its con­tin­gen­cies ac­count ex­pens­es, THA de­posits, cash man­age­ment and liq­uid­i­ty and debt fi­nanc­ing and man­age­ment.

T&T now en­joys a Baa1 rat­ing and the out­look for the THA's rat­ing may be on par. In­ter­im re­ports in­di­cate the is­land is on the high end of spec­trum when com­pared to oth­er rat­ed Latin Amer­i­can re­gion­al gov­ern­ments whose scores span Baa1 and Caa3. The is­land's bal­anced fis­cal re­sults (op­er­at­ing sur­plus), very low debt lev­els and sol­id liq­uid­i­ty po­si­tion were not­ed in the re­port and should im­pact pos­i­tive­ly on the over­all grade as­signed.

If giv­en a Baa1 rat­ing To­ba­go will be one of the high­est ranked in the Caribbean scor­ing high­er than Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica and St Vin­cent, among oth­ers.