Transparency International recently published its Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Boards and ethical investors will be paying attention. After the scandals of recent years, corruption has become a key issue with voters as well.
An anonymous reader sent me an email about our article on Venezuela from a week or so ago. He disagreed with the ACP’s conclusion that turmoil in Colombia’s neighbor was a big opportunity for our oil and gas sector. I concur with him.
Our tracking of terrorism / security incidents has changed since the Farc disarmed in 2017, both in conceptual terms and methodological ones. Based on the latest data, the trend is not good.
Slowly but surely, Infrastructure for Taxes has been positioning itself as one of the industry’s main opportunities to positively impact Colombia’s rural areas. Politicians highlighted the development of its first project from the oil and gas industry using this program. Our Bottom-Line returns to the theme of local and elite communications as it applies here.
… especially about the future. Our omnipotent Managing Editor has graciously given the Analyst one more week to complete his methodology analysis of Colombia-focused share prices. We promise. Hopefully. Or maybe the Analyst will be fired.
I was in Canada over the year-end holidays and got to spend a lot of time watching television sports (a favorite pastime). That also meant I watched a lot of commercials which, these days, means watching a lot of ads for the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
We try to stay away from share price-related issues. There are lots of commentators better suited for that activity. But we do look at share prices in aggregate as an indicator of investor faith in Colombia. Doing that means we need to ‘unpack’ the influence of various performance drivers including oil prices, other broad industry factors, company-specific factors and to get, finally, the influence of Colombia itself.
A suicide car bomb exploded in Bogotá’s police training academy last Thursday morning. Casualties stand at 21 dead and 68 injured (these may change). The Attorney General attributed the attack to the ELN and on Friday night, President Duque terminated discussions with the guerrilla group.
We updated our indices of Colombia-focused, publicly-traded companies and as expected, the slide in Brent had a noticeable impact. We also looked more closely at our composite index, especially the role of the TSX.
It is early January and time for my annual look ahead. The working title for this piece is always “Fearless Forecasts” but this year I am rather fearful.
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