If you are on­ly pick­ing this, the third in­stall­ment, it may be worth your time to look for the last two copies of the Busi­ness Guardian. The feed­back from these two columns has been quite en­cour­ag­ing which has prompt­ed me to con­tin­ue.

Last week Wednes­day night, the Val­u­a­tion of Land (Amend­ment) Bill 2023 was vot­ed on, and ap­proved, by a 18 to 14 ma­jor­i­ty in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, bring­ing T&T one step clos­er to the rein­tro­duc­tion of a tax on prop­er­ty, which was stopped in 2009.

BEL­MOPAN, Be­lize, May 22, CMC – “At the time I was liv­ing in Ja­maica, there was no rain for quite a few months. There were very se­vere wa­ter re­stric­tions where we would on­ly re­ceive wa­ter once a week” says Dr Ayan­na Alexan­der, a med­ical doc­tor and pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­al from T&T.

And it is be­lieved that the re­cent­ly launched Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Grant Chal­lenge 2023 is one of the key steps in im­prov­ing T&T’s stand­ing in that re­gard.

Trinidad and To­ba­go and Chile yes­ter­day com­menced the fourth round of ne­go­ti­a­tions for a Par­tial Scope Trade Agree­ment be­tween the two coun­tries.

More than 135 re­gion­al mi­cro-small-and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es (MSMEs) re­ceived over US$2.1 mil­lion in fund­ing to boost their busi­ness­es last year, the Caribbean Ex­port De­vel­op­ment Agency (Caribbean Ex­port) has re­vealed in its 2022 an­nu­al re­port.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said on Wednes­day that four Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment bod­ies in Trinidad could col­lect up to $198 mil­lion in prop­er­ty tax­es a year when all prop­er­ties in those cor­po­ra­tions have been val­ued us­ing the an­nu­al rental val­u­a­tion method­ol­o­gy.

The Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion’s (UTC) net in­come for its 2022 fi­nan­cial year was $52 mil­lion, a dip of $20 mil­lion or 27.7 per cent from its 2021 in­come, ac­cord­ing to the cor­po­ra­tion’s 2022 an­nu­al re­port.

Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd, the hold­ing com­pa­ny for Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd and many oth­er com­pa­nies, is the largest, in­dige­nous com­mer­cial bank hold­ing en­ti­ty in the Caribbean.

Türkiye’s Am­bas­sador to T&T, Bengü Yiğit­gü­den, has in­vit­ed T&T’s busi­ness sec­tor to build com­mer­cial ties with Türkiye, one of the world’s largest economies by Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP).

Sev­er­al months af­ter Car­ni­val 2023 end­ed, an ad­ver­tise­ment made for the sea­son by An­gos­tu­ra has land­ed the com­pa­ny in hot wa­ter af­ter a New York-based record ex­ec­u­tive claimed the rum and bit­ters man­u­fac­tur­er used a sam­ple with­out seek­ing per­mis­sion from his com­pa­ny Char­lie’s Records.

The NCB Fi­nan­cial Group (NCBFG) an­nounced yeste­day that its chair­man and ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er, Michael Lee-Chin, in­di­cat­ed he is tak­ing a leave of ab­sence ef­fec­tive im­me­di­ate­ly “to al­low him to fo­cus on cer­tain press­ing busi­ness and per­son­al mat­ters.”