San­dra Chouthi

A mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny will take place at the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, Nicholas Tow­ers, In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain, at 9.30 am to­day. The T&T Free Zones Com­pa­ny Ltd (TTFZ) will sign a US$65 mil­lion deal with Bredero Shaw Mid­dle East Ltd (BSMEL), the largest di­vi­sion of Shaw­Cor Ltd, a glob­al en­er­gy ser­vices com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in prod­ucts and ser­vices for the pipeline and pipe in­dus­try.

The deal is to re-es­tab­lish a pipe con­crete coat­ing fa­cil­i­ty and stor­age yard at Site A, Union In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, La Brea. The project an­tic­i­pates to im­port an es­ti­mat­ed US$514 mil­lion worth of raw ma­te­ri­als and ex­port prod­ucts val­ued at an es­ti­mat­ed US$548 mil­lion to the Caribbean re­gion.

The Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try said in a state­ment that the ob­jec­tive to en­sure the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work and the en­abling en­vi­ron­ment to fa­cil­i­tate trade, busi­ness and in­vest­ment and com­mer­cial ac­tiv­i­ty are in place to serve all stake­hold­ers, wel­comes this project.

"(It) will mean not on­ly ad­di­tion­al em­ploy­ment and rev­enue to cit­i­zens of T&T, but al­so re­gion­al pros­per­i­ty," the state­ment read. Among those ex­pect­ed to be at the sign­ing are: Trade Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz, Noel Cor­co­ran, project man­ag­er, BB­SMEL, Roseanne Reid, con­sul­tant, BSMEL, and Kel­ly Bainey and Kei­th Chin, chair­man and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, TTFZ, re­spec­tive­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to Bredero Shaw's Web site, it is the glob­al leader in the de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of pipe coat­ing so­lu­tions for the oil, gas, and wa­ter in­dus­tries. "Over 400,000 km of pipelines around the world have been pro­tect­ed us­ing Bredero Shaw tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vices," the site stat­ed.

Min­is­ter Cadiz said in a brief tele­phone in­ter­view on Sat­ur­day that af­ter the sign­ing, he will be leav­ing the next day, to at­tend the XI­II Unit­ed Na­tions Con­fer­ence on Trade and De­vel­op­ment (UNC­TAD) in Qatar. Cadiz is ex­pect­ed to re­turn from Qatar on April 24.

On April 26, he will lead an of­fi­cial eight-mem­ber pub­lic sec­tor del­e­ga­tion, and about 20 busi­ness peo­ple from the pri­vate sec­tor on a buy­ers' mis­sion to Ja­maica. Cadiz said the four-day trip is to "nar­row the huge dif­fer­en­tial" in trade be­tween T&T and Ja­maica. "In or­der to be fair to our Cari­com neigh­bours, we're look­ing to see what it is that Ja­maica has that we can use in Trinidad," he said.