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Friday, July 11, 2025

SDATT president: T&T must diversify to be relevant

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20140112

The re­cent oil spill in parts of south Trinidad shows the weak in­fra­struc­ture of T&T's oil in­dus­try, said Gre­go­ry Hill, pres­i­dent of the Se­cu­ri­ties Deal­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (SDATT)."They (the Gov­ern­ment) need to di­ver­si­fy if we are to be rel­e­vant in the con­text of our un­com­pet­i­tive nat­ur­al gas prices," he said.

"The de­clin­ing oil pro­duc­tion lo­cal­ly, our weak oil in­fra­struc­ture as can be seen by the re­cent oil spill, the com­pe­ti­tion from shale gas, com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er com­pet­ing en­er­gy plants from around the world–our en­er­gy sec­tor is in a pre­car­i­ous po­si­tion as our econ­o­my is de­pen­dent on those."Hill spoke yes­ter­day at the sign­ing of the pro­to­col cer­e­mo­ny be­tween the SDATT and Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion (SEC).He said the agree­ment will work in favour of the Se­cu­ri­ties In­dus­try and the econ­o­my as a whole.

"To­day the role of SDATT is a height­ened one in the T&T econ­o­my. As we see the out­look for our econ­o­my to be fair­ly mixed. Our en­er­gy sec­tor still ac­counts for 45 per cent of our Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) and that lev­el of de­pen­dence is a risk fac­tor to our in­dus­try and our econ­o­my as a whole," he said.He said be­cause of this, SDATT sees de­vel­op­ment of the cap­i­tal mar­ket as crit­i­cal for the eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion par­a­digm of the coun­try. Hill said the de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try lies at the "heart of the se­cu­ri­ties busi­ness."

"We must in­clude our sec­tor's con­tri­bu­tion from the low teens to at least a third of the econ­o­my. The on­ly way to do that is to de­vel­op our se­cu­ri­ties ser­vices. We need more IPO's and we thank Fi­nance Min­is­ter Howai for the FCB IPO. We al­so need to pri­va­tise the non-core state en­ti­ties of T&T and by do­ing this cre­ate more list­ings on the mar­ket and by do­ing so cre­ate a so­ci­ety that is more open to risk tak­ing," he said.


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