A US$400 mil­lion 10-year bond of­fered by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) has been “sig­nif­i­cant­ly over-sub­scribed” the T&T Guardian has learned.

This ac­cord­ing to a Op­pen­heimer & Co Inc to TSTT Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) Dr Ronald Wal­cott dat­ed yes­ter­day.

The bond is ex­pect­ed to to con­sol­i­date all TSTT’s li­a­bil­i­ties in­to a sin­gle fa­cil­i­ty.

“I want to con­grat­u­late you and the TSTT team for suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ing this sig­nif­i­cant and com­plex trans­ac­tion,” Tonel­li’s let­ter stat­ed.

“We kicked off the ex­e­cu­tion process with our of­fi­cial en­gage­ment on April 16, 2019 and ini­tial meet­ings. There were a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant un­der­tak­ings in­clud­ing fi­nal­is­ing the Of­fer Mem­o­ran­dum, the Rat­ing Agency pre­sen­ta­tions, the prepa­ra­tion of 2018/2019 as well as the 2019/2020 Q1 au­dit,” it stat­ed.

“Once we of­fi­cial­ly an­nounced the of­fer­ing we be­gan an in­tense and ex­ten­sive road­show over a ten-day pe­ri­od, which in­volved meet­ings, pre­sen­ta­tions, con­fer­ence calls and Q&A with many of the largest in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors around the world,” the let­ter stat­ed.

Tonel­li said TSTT had to mar­ket the com­pa­ny, and this was not easy.

“You and your team did a great job of telling the TSTT sto­ry of re­struc­tur­ing and trans­for­ma­tion. This was not an easy sto­ry to tell giv­en some of the fun­da­men­tals and the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance over the last three years, while it was ex­e­cut­ing its strate­gic plan,” the let­ter added.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly the chal­lenges as­so­ci­at­ed with the gov­ern­ment’s out­stand­ing debt to TSTT, the un­cer­tain­ty of the 49 per cent mi­nor­i­ty share­hold­ing of the com­pa­ny and the cur­rent lever­age were off­set by your Q1 per­for­mance, your team’s clar­i­ty of your strate­gic di­rec­tion and your demon­strat­ed knowl­edge of the busi­ness,” it stat­ed.

Tonel­li said the bond would be at a rate of 8.875 per cent.

“As a re­sult, we are pleased to ad­vise that the book was sig­nif­i­cant­ly over-sub­scribed. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, we are pleased to have been able to price the bond at a yield of 8.875 per cent which is well with­in our ini­tial es­ti­mates, giv­en the rat­ings, and be­low the rate we pro­ject­ed in the fi­nan­cial mod­el. Look­ing at the com­par­isons in the mar­ket, this rate is ex­cel­lent and the team should feel jus­ti­fi­ably proud of this ac­com­plish­ment,” it stat­ed.