The Joint Trade Unions Move­ment’s (JTUM) gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Ozzi War­wick, is at­tribut­ing the for­eign ex­change short­age that the coun­try is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing to the Gov­ern­ment’s clo­sure of Petrotrin as well as to a de­cline in oil and gas pro­duc­tion.

This from one small busi­nes­sown­er (who did not want to be named) who de­scribed to the Busi­ness Guardian how she ac­cess­es forex via un­con­ven­tion­al means to pay for in­puts for her can­dles and soaps busi­ness.

The Ex­plo­ration and Pro­duc­tion (Pub­lic Pe­tro­le­um Rights) Li­cence for the Rio Claro block has been grant­ed to Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T (NGC) E&P In­vest­ments Lim­it­ed and Primera Oil and Gas, a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration Inc.

An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Prime Min­is­ter Gas­ton Browne has told the Ja­maica-based San­dals Re­sorts In­ter­na­tion­al (SRI) to con­sid­er re­mov­ing its prop­er­ty from his coun­try af­ter he claimed that the lux­u­ry ho­tel brand, San­dals, has adopt­ed a pol­i­cy of not want­i­ng to pay tax­es.

Op­po­si­tion shad­ow min­is­ter of fi­nance, MP Dave Tan­coo said that while the Gov­ern­ment was forced to ex­tend its spe­cial Ex­im­bank for­eign ex­change (forex) win­dow due to pub­lic pres­sure, the fi­nance min­is­ter still has not an­swered the ques­tions about how he got cus­tomer in­for­ma­tion from the Ex­im­bank .

Loans for Christ­mas, along with those for debt con­sol­i­da­tion and home im­prove­ment, have re­mained as the top three in de­mand from cred­it unions in T&T.

The re­duc­tion of the US-dol­lar spend­ing lim­it on cred­it cards is­sued by lo­cal com­mer­cial banks con­tin­ues to be a ma­jor prob­lem as it is putting a sleep­er hold on lo­cal busi­ness­es and al­so forc­ing them to use sev­er­al cred­it cards to im­port goods.

Af­ter a week in which con­cerns over the avail­abil­i­ty and dis­tri­b­u­tion of for­eign ex­change have risen, it has emerged that the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) has cau­tioned T&T in all of the last three Ar­ti­cle IV con­sul­ta­tions with the Min­istry of Fi­nance and Cen­tral Bank that T&T “main­tains an ex­change re­stric­tion and two mul­ti­ple cur­ren­cy prac­tices sub­ject to the Fund’s ap­proval un­der Ar­ti­cle VI­II, Sec­tion 2(a) and Sec­tion 3.

The Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) is ex­plor­ing link­ages with In­dia in the area of rice pro­duc­tion.

It is ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to ac­cess for­eign ex­change for port­fo­lio in­vest­ing pur­pos­es.

Ma­jor­i­ty state-owned First Cit­i­zens Bank yes­ter­day is­sued a no­tice to its cus­tomers ad­vis­ing how to pay prop­er­ty tax on­line.

T&T’s ac­com­mo­da­tion sec­tor will get an ad­di­tion­al boost with two ho­tels car­ry­ing the Hilton brand due to join Trinidad’s ac­com­mo­da­tion sec­tor in the next two years.