Mon­day's de­c­la­ra­tion of a State of Emerge­cy (SoE), is go­ing to have an im­pact on Car­ni­val and tourist ar­rivals for the fes­ti­val.

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert said yes­ter­day that the tax amnesty and na­tion­al in­sur­ance amnesty in­tro­duced by the Fi­nance Act 2024, which ex­pired on De­cem­ber 31, 2024, will be ex­tend­ed to Jan­u­ary 31, 2025.

Top­pers Restau­rant & Bar has an­nounced the clo­sure of its lo­ca­tion at South Park Plaza, San Fer­nan­do.

In a news re­lease from the su­per­mar­ket chain, the com­pa­ny not­ed that Austin had over 25 years of ded­i­cat­ed ser­vice to the or­ga­ni­za­tion.

For a busi­ness jour­nal­ist, one of the high­lights of 2024 was the hon­esty of the com­ments made by Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Colm Im­bert, in his June af­fi­davit on the T&T Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty law­suit that the Gov­ern­ment de­fend­ed all the way to the Privy Coun­cil...and won.

Over the past year, the fis­cal poli­cies that were im­ple­ment­ed in T&T and that are cur­rent­ly un­der con­sid­er­a­tion with a view to im­ple­men­ta­tion, have had one ma­jor theme: com­pli­ance with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards.

For 2024, the top-of-mind is­sue for many busi­ness­peo­ple and groups was the for­eign ex­change crunch, which has wors­ened this year.

In Jan­u­ary, the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny con­firmed its pres­i­dent for eight years, Mark Lo­quan would be step­ping down at the end of his con­tract.

On De­cem­ber 19, 2024, a LI­AT20 ERJ145 from An­tigua touched down at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It marked the start of a five-times week­ly com­mer­cial ser­vice be­tween the two na­tions adding 1,750 week­ly seats to the mar­ket.

Among the main high­lights of T&T’s non-en­er­gy sec­tor in 2024 were ef­forts made to fur­ther pro­pel the coun­try as a lead­ing des­ti­na­tion in the re­gion, which would gen­er­ate much need for­eign ex­change.

While T&T’s Cen­tral Bank is get­ting ready to roll out a pi­lot pro­gramme in 2025 for the Uni­fied Pay­ments In­ter­face (UPI) re­al time pay­ment sys­tem de­vel­oped in In­dia, there could be se­cu­ri­ty risks in­volved in launch­ing this in­no­v­a­tive pay­ment sys­tem.

The busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty has mixed views on the State of Emer­gency (SoE), with some lead­ers ex­press­ing cau­tious sup­port.