Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dave Tan­coo is not con­cerned by the drop in share prices of state-owned bank First Cit­i­zens.

The Gov­ern­ment is mov­ing to ap­point a ma­jor­i­ty of the di­rec­tors on the board of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), which would en­sure con­trol by the State of the re­gion’s largest fi­nan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny.

Yet an­oth­er se­nior ex­ec­u­tive at­tached to a state-owned en­er­gy com­pa­ny has de­part­ed his of­fice.

With­in hours of soft­en­ing his tone on No­vem­ber 16 as re­gards his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s pol­i­cy po­si­tion­ing on Venezuela, US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump re­vert­ed to turn­ing the screws once again on Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go gov­ern­ment has tabled the Vir­tu­al As­sets and Vir­tu­al As­sets Ser­vice Providers Bill 2025 (“the Bill”). Be­fore we can dis­cuss the im­pli­ca­tions and ef­fects of the Bill, it would be use­ful for us to get an un­der­stand­ing of what is a vir­tu­al as­set.

Glob­al­ly, re­new­ables are be­com­ing more and more ac­ces­si­ble, and far cheap­er than any time in his­to­ry, but this is one glob­al trend strug­gling to take hold in the Caribbean. In­stead, so­lar busi­nes­sown­ers in Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T) and in­dus­try ex­perts re­port a grad­ual uptick in in­ter­est in so­lar en­er­gy and a slow de­cline in cost re­gion­al­ly.

While most new house list­ings have left many low- and mid­dle-in­come earn­ers de­spair­ing that their dream of home own­er­ship may be a far-fetched re­al­i­ty, a niche mar­ket has emerged which may have giv­en them new hope.

Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do emerged as the cham­pi­ons of the 4th Sec­ondary Schools’ Busi­ness Sim­u­la­tion Com­pe­ti­tion, sig­nalling not on­ly a ma­jor achieve­ment for the school but al­so a deep­er na­tion­al shift. Trinidad and To­ba­go’s next gen­er­a­tion is em­brac­ing en­tre­pre­neur­ship, in­no­va­tion and busi­ness lead­er­ship at lev­els nev­er seen be­fore.

Guyana has re­cent­ly ac­com­plished a mon­u­men­tal achieve­ment in its en­er­gy sec­tor, cel­e­brat­ing a new high in crude oil pro­duc­tion of 900,000 bar­rels of oil per day (bopd).

In June 2022, Ja­maica’s pub­licly list­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion gi­ant, Se­prod, ac­quired 60 per cent of T&T’s pri­vate­ly held dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny, AS Bry­den & Sons Hold­ings (AS­BH), for about US$45 mil­lion. That ac­qui­si­tion was fund­ed by a loan of US$25 mil­lion and 6.0% pref­er­ence shares worth US$20 mil­lion.

Uni­com­er, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Courts, has con­fi­dence in the Trinidad and To­ba­go mar­ket de­spite the re­cent de­par­ture of one of its longest-stand­ing com­peti­tors, Stan­dard Dis­trib­u­tors.

For some, it’s now a dis­tant mem­o­ry. For most, you are prob­a­bly not even aware this hap­pened. Hav­ing had to work through it while in­volved with one of the ma­jor com­mer­cial banks in T&T, it is def­i­nite­ly some­thing that as a coun­try we need to be re­mind­ed or be­come aware of.