Dig­i­cel has filed for bank­rupt­cy in Bermu­da but is in­sist­ing that it is busi­ness as usu­al.

“I was ex­cit­ed. I was turn­ing a new page in my life and I was very hope­ful about what was to come,” Saman­tha, 35, told Guardian Me­dia.

While com­pa­nies around the world have been suf­fer­ing fi­nan­cial­ly as a re­sult of COVID-19, the GraceKennedy Group has record­ed its best re­sults in re­cent times.

For the first quar­ter of 2020 Trinidad and To­ba­go NGL Lim­it­ed (TTNGL) record­ed an af­ter tax prof­it of $6.9 mil­lion. This rep­re­sents an 85 per cent slide from the com­par­a­tive pe­ri­od in 2019 of $45.8 mil­lion.

Now that we are clear on where I stand let us al­so be clear that there are el­e­ments of those out­comes that we face every day that we can con­trol and there are el­e­ments that are en­tire­ly out­side of our con­trol. Yet every day all of us man­age the risks be­tween what we can con­trol and what we can­not con­trol and do so nor­mal­ly. It is part of life. We do not fear this and for many we re­ly on faith when cir­cum­stances get the bet­ter of us.

When com­pared to the oth­er Caribbean is­lands like Guyana, Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica, T&T is ranked last in its abil­i­ty to col­lect tax­es. This is the con­tention of the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Allyson West.

The re­stric­tions on move­ment and do­ing busi­ness are be­ing lift­ed in phas­es over the next few weeks. If you have been read­ing my columns and tak­ing ac­tion you should have de­cid­ed on your re­sponse to a phys­i­cal­ly dis­tanced world—de­liv­ery on­ly restau­rants, lim­its on group sizes, more on­line com­merce. I hope that you have al­so tak­en the time to com­plete a more in depth analy­sis of your busi­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly its pur­pose.

To­ba­go has been re­tained as a des­ti­na­tion on Vir­gin At­lantic’s 2021 sum­mer sched­ule but this time the flights will em­anate and con­clude at Lon­don’s Heathrow Air­port. This was an­nounced in a re­cent re­lease by the air­line.

While many gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials have been try­ing to utilise dig­i­tal plat­forms to make in­ter­ac­tion with the pub­lic eas­i­er and seam­less, T&T is mere­ly scratch­ing the sur­face in terms of where the coun­try must go when it comes to dig­i­tal mi­gra­tion.

In fact, con­ser­v­a­tive es­ti­mates say that our cre­ative in­dus­try can make us at least $1 bil­lion a year.

For the three months end­ed March 31, 2020, Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) reg­is­tered a net prof­it of $1.3 mil­lion, up $6.7 mil­lion when com­pared to a net loss of $5.4 mil­lion for the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2019.

The West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny Ltd (Wit­co) has record­ed a prof­it af­ter tax of $105 mil­lion for the three months end­ed 31 March, 2020. This rep­re­sents a $4.9 mil­lion or 4.9 per cent in­crease over the same pe­ri­od in 2019.