Trinidad and To­ba­go should take no com­fort from the fact that its oil is bench­marked against Brent and not West Texas In­ter­me­di­ate which crashed to be­low ze­ro dol­lars for a bar­rel of oil ac­cord­ing to En­er­gy Con­sul­tant An­tho­ny E. Paul.

The crash of the US oil mar­ket and with it the price of West Texas In­ter­me­di­ate (WTI) came as no sur­prise to close ob­servers of the glob­al com­mod­i­ty mar­kets as de­mand re­mains weak and sup­ply strong lead­ing to a mas­sive over-sup­ply of the mar­ket. It was, how­ev­er, still spec­tac­u­lar and would have sent shock-waves through­out all oil pro­duc­ing coun­tries.

While fur­ther re­stric­tions were be­ing im­posed on busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty in T&T yes­ter­day to curb the spread of COVID-19, sev­er­al Eu­ro­pean coun­tries lift­ed their own mea­sures in an at­tempt to restart eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.

RBC Roy­al Bank of T&T Ltd (RBC T&T)has re­vealed that it will be tem­porar­i­ly clos­ing two ad­di­tion­al branch­es due to COVID-19.

The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of the cur­rent COVID-19 cri­sis are un­prece­dent­ed for Trinidad and To­ba­go and sev­er­al sec­tors in­clud­ing tourism, man­u­fac­tur­ing, con­struc­tion, and hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­tries will be hard­est hit.

Unilever Caribbean Ltd has record­ed a loss for the 2019 fi­nan­cial year of $54.3 mil­lion ac­cord­ing to its 2019 au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments.

T&T’s health­care sys­tem has been giv­en a shot in the arm as the coun­try will re­ceive from the CAF—De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca a loan of $$340 mil­lion (US$50) to mit­i­gate the COVID-19 health cri­sis here.

Trinidad and To­ba­go NGL Ltd (TTNGL) has post­ed an af­ter-tax prof­it of $129.5 mil­lion for the year end­ed 2019. This rep­re­sents a 48.79 per cent de­crease from the net prof­it of the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od of $252.9 mil­lion.

The In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund’s (IMF) has pro­ject­ed that T&T’s econ­o­my will con­tract by 4.5 per cent for 2020.

This is how some lo­cal im­porters and dis­trib­u­tors have de­scribed the de­ci­sion by Smith­field Foods to idle its Sioux Falls, South Dako­ta, pork-pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ty.

BPTT has not had any dis­rup­tion to its sup­ply of nat­ur­al gas even though it has been forced to make changes to its op­er­a­tions ac­cord­ing to its Re­gion­al Pres­i­dent, Claire Fitz­patrick.

Uni­com­er (Trinidad) Ltd, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Courts, has col­lab­o­rat­ed with its sup­pli­ers to pro­cure, do­nat­ed and de­liv­er fur­nish­ings and sup­plies to the 50-bed Step­down Fa­cil­i­ty at the Na­tion­al Rac­quet Cen­tre in Tacarigua.