There is a grow­ing sen­ti­ment that it is time to re­set and reimag­ine the re­gion’s eco­nom­ic re­la­tion­ship with Africa.

With the Gov­ern­ment’s firm stance against the elec­tric­i­ty rate hike pro­posed by the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC), con­cerns mount over the long-term fi­nan­cial health of the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC).

Guardian Me­dia’s free­lance busi­ness re­porter, Raphael John-Lall, vis­it­ed Venezuela last week as part of a group of jour­nal­ists from 50 coun­tries who were in­vit­ed by Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. The jour­nal­ists toured key non-en­er­gy busi­ness­es and par­tic­i­pat­ed in work­shops and dis­cus­sions about so­cial and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ments not on­ly in Venezuela but the Glob­al South..

US en­er­gy gi­ant Exxon­Mo­bil’s ne­go­ti­a­tion for the award of sev­en ul­tra-deep­wa­ter ex­plo­ration blocks off the coun­try’s east coast of Trinidad and To­ba­go is a done deal, ac­cord­ing to an in­ter­na­tion­al news re­port.

Agos­ti­ni has ex­tend­ed the dead­line of its of­fer to ac­quire Pres­tige Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (PHL) for a sec­ond time.

The Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go met with two pri­vate sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tions on Mon­day and yes­ter­day, with the top­ic of for­eign ex­change dom­i­nat­ing the stake­hold­er en­gage­ments.

Rock Hard Ce­ment of­fi­cial­ly re­turned to the T&T mar­ket yes­ter­day af­ter an ab­sence of al­most four years.

Stake­hold­ers across var­i­ous sec­tors are call­ing for col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­forts to off­set any po­ten­tial im­pact from the in­crease in rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iff rates from 10 to 15 per cent by the Unit­ed States.

The en­er­gy sec­tor is the ma­jor con­trib­u­tor to na­tion­al in­come, con­tribut­ing on av­er­age 30-40 per cent of gross do­mes­tic prod­uct (GDP). How­ev­er, it on­ly em­ploys on av­er­age 2 per cent of the na­tion­al work­force or around 12,700 peo­ple.

Op­po­si­tion MP, Bri­an Man­ning, yes­ter­day cau­tioned that the 15 per cent tar­iffs that the Unit­ed States is prepar­ing to im­pose on ex­ports from T&T on Thurs­day could put ad­di­tion­al strain on this coun­try’s for­eign re­serves and sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease the risk of a de­val­u­a­tion of the TT dol­lar.

Roger Ho­sein, pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus of The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), has stat­ed that T&T’s Im­port Cov­er Ra­tio (ICR) re­mained sta­ble be­tween 2019 and 2025, large­ly be­cause of ex­ter­nal bor­row­ing.

Un­der the own­er­ship of LJ Williams Ltd, The Home Store is un­der­go­ing a sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tion de­signed to re-es­tab­lish its com­mer­cial vi­tal­i­ty and repo­si­tion the busi­ness in a rapid­ly shift­ing re­tail land­scape.