In T&T’s on­go­ing de­bate over for­eign ex­change ac­cess, two com­pet­ing frame­works have emerged: Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo’s five-point plan, aimed at re­form­ing and stream­lin­ing forex dis­tri­b­u­tion, and the Cen­tral Bank’s decades-old ho­n­our sys­tem, which re­lies on com­mer­cial banks to al­lo­cate for­eign cur­ren­cy with fair­ness and dis­cre­tion.

In a pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, the En­er­gy Cham­ber ex­am­ined em­ploy­ment da­ta trends with­in the en­er­gy sec­tor. This high­light­ed that, de­spite its crit­i­cal role in dri­ving eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, the sec­tor em­ploys on­ly about 2 per cent of the work­force.

There are winds of change sweep­ing across the Caribbean, and they’re not me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal. My re­cent va­ca­tion in Ja­maica deep­ened my con­cerns about sev­er­al press­ing re­gion­al is­sues:

The First Cit­i­zens Group yes­ter­day clar­i­fied the dif­fer­ence be­tween First Cit­i­zens Hold­ings (FCH) and First Cit­i­zens Group Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings (FCGFH), main­tain­ing that FCH is a pri­vate com­pa­ny ful­ly owned by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance (Cor­po­ra­tion Sole), which holds the State’s 60.11 per cent share­hold­ing in FCGFH, the pub­licly list­ed com­pa­ny on the T&T Stock Ex­change.

Months af­ter an­nounc­ing plans to re-en­gage with Grena­da con­cern­ing the pos­si­ble ex­plo­ration of oil and gas there, En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal met with the Prime Min­is­ter of Grena­da Dick­on Mitchell con­cern­ing the mat­ter.

For over a cen­tu­ry, T&T has been in the oil busi­ness and for all 63 years of its in­de­pen­dence, the na­tion has leaned heav­i­ly on this re­source.

For­mer pres­i­dent of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) Roger Roach has re­signed as a di­rec­tor of the T&T NGL Ltd (TTNGL).

En­er­gy ex­pert An­tho­ny Paul sug­gests that if diplo­mat­ic re­la­tions be­tween T&T and Venezuela de­te­ri­o­rate, this can pose a long-term risk to the sta­bil­i­ty of the Man­a­tee cross-bor­der mar­itime field, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s pro-US stance.

In this ar­ti­cle, we high­light sev­er­al re­cent civ­il law judg­ments of par­tic­u­lar le­gal and com­mer­cial sig­nif­i­cance.

BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos — The 15th edi­tion of the Caribbean Fes­ti­val of Arts (Car­ifes­ta) opened on Fri­day with or­gan­is­ers promis­ing to de­liv­er “glob­al ex­cel­lence” in keep­ing with the ten-day cel­e­bra­tion’s theme—Caribbean Roots, Glob­al Ex­cel­lence.

T&T could be just months away from shed­ding its long-stand­ing la­bel as a tax haven, with the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) con­firm­ing the coun­try is on course to be ful­ly re­moved from its black­list by Feb­ru­ary 2026.

Chair­man of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers, Vivek Char­ran is op­ti­mistic that Venezue­lan mi­grants, and mi­grants in gen­er­al, will con­tin­ue to con­tribute to the busi­ness sec­tor and the econ­o­my.