Gov­ern­ment should re­assess To­ba­go’s air­port ex­pan­sion project now bud­get­ed to cost $1.3 bil­lion and which ac­cord­ing to Mark Edghill, pres­i­dent of the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries (TTC­SI), will not de­rive any im­me­di­ate ben­e­fit from the tourism sec­tor.

State-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um con­tin­ues to re­port strong eco­nom­ic per­for­mance as the com­pa­ny has made an af­ter tax prof­it of $1.2 bil­lion for the first nine months of the 2021 fi­nan­cial year.

So said Gre­go­ry N. Hill the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of ANSA Mer­chant Bank in an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian (BG) as he hailed the mer­its of the pri­vate-pub­lic part­ner­ship mod­el of project de­vel­op­ment in ad­vanc­ing na­tion­al goals .

The chal­lenges faced by the lo­cal in­sur­ance in­dus­try in ac­cess­ing for­eign ex­change to set­tle their rein­sur­ance debts needs to be ad­dressed ur­gent­ly, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Tatil and Tatil Life M Musa Ibrahim has said.

If you be­lieve you have seen a marked in­crease in your gro­cery bill over the last year, then the Cen­tral Bank says you are not imag­in­ing it.

To turn around the de­cline and grow To­ba­go’s econ­o­my it would take an­nu­al in­vest­ment of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $600 mil­lion to gen­er­ate an­nu­al out­put growth of one per cent.

Se­nior Coun­sel Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj has blamed the for­mer Board of Petrotrin, led by busi­ness­man Wil­fred Es­pinet, for the de­ba­cle that re­sult­ed in A&V Oil and Gas Ltd be­ing re­moved from the Casthill oil field in Rio Claro, then win­ning its ar­bi­tra­tion against the State Owned com­pa­ny and even­tu­al­ly set­tling for over $100 mil­lion.

There is al­ready $200 mil­lion of pri­vate cap­i­tal be­ing in­vest­ed in lo­cal agri­cul­ture and plans are afoot to in­creas­ing­ly use tech­nol­o­gy to both boost pro­duc­tion and ex­pand the range of pro­duce grown in T&T.

Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Stu­art Young, has said the Gov­ern­ment is heart­ened by the pos­i­tive out­look for the pri­ma­ry en­er­gy re­sources, par­tic­u­lar­ly nat­ur­al gas, giv­en the en­er­gy sec­tor’s in­flu­ence on the lo­cal econ­o­my.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert is set to present to 2022 bud­get in the next few days which will seek to do the im­pos­si­ble, that of a tight con­trol on ex­pen­di­ture while at the same time try­ing to tru­ly be­gin the trans­for­ma­tion of the coun­try’s econ­o­my.

“We are in a per­fect storm… in a ves­sel which is poor­ly en­gi­neered to take sus­tained pres­sure and un­der the com­mand of of­fi­cers who ap­par­ent­ly can­not bring them­selves to face up to the re­al­i­ties of the storm or the in­ad­e­qua­cies of the ves­sel they are nav­i­gat­ing! So the cri­sis is not ‘im­pend­ing’, it has been with us for some time.”

The Na­tion­al En­er­gy Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T Ltd has signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) with Methanex Trinidad Ltd to con­duct a fea­si­bil­i­ty study to ex­plore the vi­a­bil­i­ty of methanol as an al­ter­na­tive fu­el for trans­port in this coun­try and the re­gion.