Around 1997 I was seat­ed in the hall at Queen’s Roy­al Col­lege lim­ing with my best friends Adri­an Gob­in and Richard De­noon when Gob­in told us he had an idea for a busi­ness.

Trinidad and To­ba­go can ex­pect to see a boost in its sup­ply of crude oil and fur­ther sta­bil­i­ty in its nat­ur­al gas sup­ply as the Block 3(a) Ru­by de­vel­op­ment project be­gins pro­duc­tion ahead of sched­ule.

BHP Bil­li­ton’s Ru­by field will not mean any net ad­di­tion­al gas will be added to the com­pa­ny or T&T’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion but would in­stead be used to keep present pro­duc­tion at peak lev­els for a longer time.

For­mer Cli­co In­vest­ment Bank (CIB) chair­man An­dre Mon­teil and for­mer CIB Pres­i­dent Richard Trot­man have been or­dered to pay al­most $100 mil­lion in resti­tu­tion to their for­mer em­ploy­er over a con­tro­ver­sial un­se­cured loan to Mon­teil be­fore the bank’s col­lapse.

Jour­nal­ists are sto­ry­tellers and you of­ten find your­self sur­prised at the twists and turns that your sto­ry can take.

Over $70 mil­lion of bad debt is set to be writ­ten off by Ven­ture Cred­it Union as it at­tempts to be ful­ly com­pli­ant with the in­ter­na­tion­al ac­count­ing stan­dards for fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.

The T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion has rec­om­mend­ed to Gov­ern­ment that there must be in­creased fo­cus and in­spec­tion at the coun­try’s var­i­ous bor­ders, es­pe­cial­ly at the ports and with­in the Free Trade Zone to clamp down on il­lic­it trade and oth­er nu­mer­ous forms of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.

Whether you agreed with him, whether you thought his poli­cies were wrong, even if you were on dif­fer­ent sides, it was dif­fi­cult to dis­like Franklin (Frankie) Khan.

Trib­utes con­tin­ue to pour in for late En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan this time from the Min­is­ter of Nat­ur­al Re­sources in Guyana Vick­ram Bhar­rat, who on be­half of the gov­ern­ment of Guyana yes­ter­day ex­tend­ed “deep­est con­do­lences” to the Trinidad and To­ba­go gov­ern­ment and the fam­i­ly of Franklin Khan on the pass­ing of the late En­er­gy Min­is­ter.

Movi­etowne will not be closed in spite of the Wednes­day’s an­nounce­ment to sus­pend in house din­ing at cin­e­mas, bars and restau­rant.

The Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU) is warn­ing of an in­crease in “ro­mance scams” tak­ing place in this coun­try.

It has be­come a part of the mod­ern lex­i­con to re­fer to this cur­rent pe­ri­od as the fourth in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion.