This is the third edi­tion of a sev­en-part se­ries fea­tur­ing sec­ondary school stu­dents pro­vid­ing their thoughts on En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial, and Gov­er­nance (ESG) is­sues as part of the HAR­CON Na­tion­al Youth Sus­tain­abil­i­ty and ESG Pi­lot Project

Do­mes­ti­cal­ly, eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty will be but­tressed by the sta­bil­i­sa­tion of en­er­gy sec­tor out­put and mod­est ex­pan­sion of the non-en­er­gy sec­tor over the short to medi­um-term.

An­na Hen­der­son has been named as the new pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Am­cham T&T).

For­mer chief labour of­fi­cer at the Min­istry of Labour and now in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions con­sul­tant, Sabi­na Gomez, is as­sur­ing both em­ploy­ers and trade unions that the use of Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) in the world of busi­ness and in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions is a re­al­i­ty and will trans­form the old way of do­ing busi­ness.

As T&T con­tin­ues to bat­tle the forex crunch which con­tin­ues to af­fect busi­ness­es and or­di­nary cit­i­zens, two econ­o­mists are rec­om­mend­ing that Gov­ern­ment—in its mid year bud­get re­view—take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion im­ple­ment­ing a “man­aged float” go­ing for­ward.

In to­day’s hy­per-com­pet­i­tive busi­ness land­scape, com­pa­nies glob­al­ly and in T&T, are re­al­is­ing a sim­ple but pow­er­ful truth: fo­cussing on cus­tomer re­ten­tion of­ten yields far greater re­turns than pour­ing re­sources in­to ac­quir­ing new cus­tomers.

In the May 29 edi­tion of the Busi­ness Guardian, in this space, I wrote a com­men­tary head­lined, “Can Kam­la ex­pose ‘forex dis­tri­b­u­tion car­tel?” which ad­dressed com­ments made at the post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence on May 15 by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar. At that news con­fer­ence, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar said that she had man­dat­ed three of her min­is­ters—Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Dav­en­dra­dath Tan­coo, Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment, Kennedy Swarats­ingh and Min­is­ter of Trade, In­vest­ment, and Tourism, Satyaka­ma “Ka­ma” Ma­haraj—to pro­duce a re­port on for­eign ex­change dis­tri­b­u­tion and leak­age over the past 10 years.

Mil­lions of dol­lars in pub­lic funds could be saved through the adop­tion of dig­i­tal con­struc­tion strate­gies.

In 2024, there were four ma­jor pro­duc­ers of nat­ur­al gas in T&T, name­ly bpTT, Shell, EOG Re­sources and Wood­side. To­geth­er these com­pa­nies pro­duce about 95 per cent of the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas. Al­most all of this comes from off­shore fields pre­dom­i­nant­ly off the east of Trinidad and north coasts of T&T.

As the mid-year bud­get re­view ap­proach­es busi­ness cham­ber heads would like to see the for­eign ex­change ac­cess dif­fi­cul­ties, ease of do­ing busi­ness, di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion strate­gies as well as crime and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, be at the fore­front.

For­mer Plan­ning Min­is­ter dur­ing the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment, Dr Bhoe Tewarie, is hop­ing T&T can man­age its re­la­tion­ship with Venezuela, giv­en the po­ten­tial for trade and busi­ness ties in the fu­ture.

The new board of ma­jor­i­ty State-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) was in­stalled yes­ter­day, sources told Guardian Me­dia.