Ma­jor busi­ness groups and shop­pers are com­mend­ing the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) for launch­ing Op­er­a­tion Fes­tive Shield, a high-vis­i­bil­i­ty crime plan that has seen an im­me­di­ate in­crease in pa­trols ahead of Christ­mas and Car­ni­val 2026.

Some mem­bers of the pri­vate sec­tor and gov­ern­ment are call­ing for the Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion (FTC) to use its pow­ers to en­force the law against abuse of mo­nop­oly pow­er. (I ex­plained else­where that it can­not act against mo­nop­oly pow­er since that is not il­le­gal). It would be good to ex­plain what pow­ers are con­ferred on the FTC by the Fair Trad­ing Act (FTA).

Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), the par­ent com­pa­ny of Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd, yes­ter­day named Yash­mid Kara­math as the com­pa­ny’s new chair­man.

To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor is once again nav­i­gat­ing rough seas; this time caught be­tween frag­ile air­lift, ris­ing op­er­at­ing costs and grow­ing geopo­lit­i­cal un­cer­tain­ty.Pres­i­dent of the To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion (TH­TA), Regi­nald Mac Lean, has al­ready sound­ed the alarm on what he de­scribed as a sharply un­der­per­form­ing win­ter sea­son, which of­fi­cial­ly be­gan on Mon­day, De­cem­ber 15.

An­gos­tu­ra is en­joy­ing healthy sales this Christ­mas sea­son, thanks to strate­gic price re­duc­tions that have res­onat­ed strong­ly with con­sumers.

Xtra Foods of­fi­cial­ly opened its sev­enth lo­ca­tion at South Park last Fri­day morn­ing, mark­ing the su­per­mar­ket chain’s first ex­pan­sion in­to south­ern Trinidad and a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in its na­tion­al growth.

The cost of liv­ing, ris­ing debt, loan re­fi­nanc­ing and mort­gage pay­ments are con­stant­ly on the mind of the av­er­age adult dai­ly.

“Workover” is a term used in the oil and gas in­dus­try to de­scribe the main­te­nance and re­pair of ex­ist­ing wells. These in­ter­ven­tions are un­der­tak­en to re­store pro­duc­tion in de­clin­ing wells or to restart those that have ceased pro­duc­ing en­tire­ly. As such, they are a vi­tal com­po­nent of the oil and gas well life­cy­cle.

I thank Mr. Fazir Khan, Pres­i­dent of the JCC, for his thought­ful en­gage­ment on the ques­tion of an­nu­al pro­cure­ment plan­ning un­der the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­poal of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty Act (PPDP­PA) in the Busi­ness Guardian of De­cem­ber 4, un­der the head­line ‘The OPRs ap­proach is prag­mat­ic.’

In 1843, Charles Dick­ens pub­lished the clas­sic - A Christ­mas Car­ol. Since then, it has formed the ba­sis of many a Christ­mas con­cert. To­day it will form the ba­sis of an im­por­tant les­son in per­son­al fi­nance. This col­umn is based on a book ti­tled “The Fi­nan­cial Wis­dom of Ebenez­er Scrooge: 5 Prin­ci­ples To Trans­form Your Re­la­tion­ship with Mon­ey” by Ted Klontz, Brad Klontz and Rick Kahler.

The Caribbean is liv­ing through a mo­ment of ris­ing geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sion. As the Unit­ed States in­ten­si­fies pres­sure on the Maduro gov­ern­ment in Venezuela, the rip­ples reach Cari­com shores fast. None of these coun­tries chose this con­fronta­tion, yet each of them is forced to nav­i­gate its con­se­quences.

On Tues­day, Sagi­cor Fi­nan­cial Com­pa­ny (SFC) an­nounced the merg­er of its two com­pa­nies in the re­gion—Sagi­cor Group Ja­maica and Sagi­cor Life Inc—bring­ing to­geth­er a Ja­maican com­pa­ny with a T&T in­cor­po­rat­ed en­ti­ty un­der a new, sin­gle Caribbean hold­ing struc­ture.