Trinidad and To­ba­go can­not keep ask­ing for ex­pe­ri­ence with­out cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties to ac­quire it.

Two weeks af­ter the cur­rent Cab­i­net was con­sti­tut­ed, on May 15, 2025, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar held a post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Red House at which she man­dat­ed three of her min­is­ters to pro­duce a re­port on dis­tri­b­u­tion and leak­age of for­eign ex­change over the pre­vi­ous ten years. In those com­ments, she ac­cused lo­cal banks of op­er­at­ing a for­eign ex­change dis­tri­b­u­tion car­tel.

Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Ltd has record­ed a sig­nif­i­cant off­shore pro­duc­tion suc­cess, with its lat­est well in the Trin­mar North (TNA) acreage de­liv­er­ing test rates ex­ceed­ing 800 bar­rels of oil per day, 26 per cent above its fore­cast ini­tial pro­duc­tion rate.

T&T’s econ­o­my is “ex­treme­ly chal­leng­ing”, with the coun­try suf­fer­ing a $35 bil­lion de­cline in Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) be­tween 2015 and 2021, for­mer min­is­ter of plan­ning Dr Bhoe Tewarie has said.

This week, we con­tin­ue on our “off the beat­en path” ex­am­i­na­tion of the 2027 Bud­get with a third bud­get is­sue that cen­tres on the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween ac­count­ing and mar­ket re­al­i­ty. It is com­mon at this time, to hear calls from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion and cham­bers of com­merce for Gov­ern­ment to pay out­stand­ing Val­ue Added Tax (VAT) re­funds. Along­side that call sits your con­stant con­cern over for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty and the lev­el of our of­fi­cial re­serves.

To­ba­go Car­ni­val con­tin­ues to at­tract grow­ing num­bers of re­gion­al and di­as­po­ra vis­i­tors while de­liv­er­ing sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits for the is­land, but there re­mains room to strength­en the fes­ti­val’s dis­tinct­ly To­bag­on­ian char­ac­ter, says head of UWI St Au­gus­tine’s De­part­ment of Cre­ative and Fes­ti­val Arts (DC­FA) Dr Jo-Anne Tull.

Draw­ing on Di­vali’s mes­sage of light over­com­ing dark­ness, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal said it was on­ly a mat­ter of time be­fore a “very large deya” was lit at the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery, adding that the Gov­ern­ment was fol­low­ing a path no court chal­lenge could de­rail.

The T&T Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion (TTFTC) has launched a re­view of a pro­posed merg­er in­volv­ing for­eign com­pa­nies with sig­nif­i­cant op­er­a­tions in T&T and is invit­ing stake­hold­ers to weigh in on whether the trans­ac­tion can af­fect com­pe­ti­tion in the lo­cal en­er­gy ser­vices sec­tor.

Lead­er­ship up­heaval hit two ma­jor state-con­trolled com­pa­nies this week, with Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) CEO Ter­rence Kalloo abrupt­ly ter­mi­nat­ed and An­gos­tu­ra Hold­ings Ltd’s group gen­er­al coun­sel and cor­po­rate sec­re­tary Kathry­na Bap­tiste As­see re­sign­ing.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute (TT­TI) has raised con­cerns about the Gov­ern­ment’s abil­i­ty to main­tain trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty in pub­lic spend­ing through Bud­get 2027, warn­ing that changes to pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion could weak­en safe­guards at a time when bil­lions of dol­lars are be­ing al­lo­cat­ed to pub­lic projects.

Hid­den with­in T&T’s econ­o­my is an es­ti­mat­ed US$2.8 bil­lion in ex­port po­ten­tial, a fig­ure that un­der­scores both the coun­try’s un­tapped strengths and the grow­ing ur­gency of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

The Cair­com Pri­vate Sec­tor Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CP­SO) is call­ing for per­ma­nent ex­emp­tions from US mar­itime ser­vice fees for Caribbean ship­ping, warn­ing that any lapse could in­crease freight costs and dis­rupt the move­ment of goods across the re­gion.