Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

Claims of fi­nan­cial mis­man­age­ment and over­spend­ing are be­ing lev­elled against those who worked on the front line of Caribbean Next Top Mod­el (CNTM), as Dionyse Fitzwilliam, ex­ec­u­tive pro­duc­er, de­fends her com­pa­ny in the face of claims it did not pay all the fees owed to those who worked on the pro­duc­tion.Fitzwilliam, who shares the ex­ec­u­tive pro­duc­er ti­tle with sis­ter Wendy, said she did not run the pro­duc­tion on a dai­ly ba­sis.

Con­tact­ed by phone in New York, where she lives and works as an in­vest­ment banker, Fitzwilliam said Ian Roy­er and Shane Ram were the ones re­spon­si­ble for man­ag­ing the crew."Ian's job was to man­age the ex­e­cu­tion of the pro­duc­tion and Shane's job was to as­sist Ian with HR and gov­ern­ment re­la­tions."

Roy­er, who is cred­it­ed as the cre­ative di­rec­tor, was the per­son who bought the CNTM fran­chise and was re­spon­si­ble for pulling the Fitzwilliam sis­ters on board. He re­signed in De­cem­ber 2011 and the sis­ters paid him for con­trol of the com­pa­ny, Caribe NTM.When con­tact­ed he de­clined to com­ment, say­ing he had signed a con­fi­den­tial­i­ty agree­ment.Ram was hired as the di­rec­tor of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment on the pro­duc­tion.

Fitzwilliam said she was man­ag­ing every­thing re­mote­ly, as she had to fly back and forth be­cause of her work com­mit­ments. As a re­sult, she said, many de­ci­sions were made with­out her knowl­edge or au­tho­ri­sa­tion.One of them was the de­ci­sion to al­low the crew to work an ex­tra ten days. Con­trary to re­ports, she said she was not at that meet­ing."The rea­son they had to work the ex­tra ten days is be­cause Ian brought in the girls be­fore any­thing was ready," she said.

She al­so said she told Danielle Di­ef­fen­thaller, di­rec­tor of the pro­duc­tion, she had no mon­ey to pay the crew for the ex­tra time."I nev­er saw or in­ter­act­ed with them un­til they turned up to get paid on De­cem­ber 5," she said.She al­so claimed that at that meet­ing, the crew signed a doc­u­ment say­ing what they were paid was the full and fi­nal pay­ment for work on CNTM.

Fitzwilliam said there were fi­nan­cial is­sues from the be­gin­ning, when one of the big spon­sors pulled out, and at that point she told Di­ef­fen­thaller to stop send­ing re­vised bud­gets, as the crew would be paid less."You can't keep re­send­ing bud­gets dur­ing a process," she says. "I told Danielle, 'We have a fi­nite amount.' She said she and Ian would raise ad­di­tion­al funds."

Fitzwilliam said no mon­ey was raised and she had to put up close to a half-a-mil­lion US dol­lars of her own."I nev­er re­ceived a week­ly spend–or dai­ly–and CBS was ask­ing for footage re­peat­ed­ly, which is why I did not sign the con­tracts. I got no re­sumes or footage and with­out the footage, there is no show, so you can't com­mer­cialise it," she ex­plained.

De­scrib­ing the film­ing as the most trau­mat­ic thing she has ever ex­pe­ri­enced, Fitzwilliam said she was pushed around and threat­ened when she start­ed to put her foot down as she be­came aware of what was go­ing on."When I land­ed in Trinidad I got a s---storm from spon­sors," she said, re­veal­ing one ho­tel claimed the com­pa­ny owed $80,000, while there were bills of $1,200 from Hy­att and a US$900 bill from More Vi­no.

She said her com­pa­ny is fac­ing a big loss–in ex­cess of US$400,000. The to­tal sum gath­ered from spon­sors came up to US$250,000. On the is­sue of pay­ing the cater­er, Steve Ho­sein, Fitzwilliam said she nev­er saw any doc­u­men­ta­tion to prove he pro­vid­ed the ser­vice and de­nied any knowl­edge of the re­ceipts that the T&T Guardian saw."If I had the fi­nances to do it, I would pay them. But the show has to make mon­ey. The com­pa­ny is in a hole.

"I am not spend­ing any more of my mon­ey, and not for sub­stan­dard work," she said, claim­ing Blue Col­lar Pro­duc­tions in Los An­ge­les had to fill a lot of gaps to put the show to­geth­er."I am as much a ca­su­al­ty of this as every­one. The on­ly peo­ple who ben­e­fit­ted are Danielle and Alas­tair Wait­he (the as­sis­tant pro­duc­er)."

Fitzwilliam said at this point she is fo­cused on pay­ing the judges, Richard Young and Pe­dro Vir­gil. But she says she is al­so open to talks with the crew, point­ing out that if they go ahead with plans to file an in­junc­tion, that would de­crease their like­li­hood of get­ting paid.

"If the goal is to drag it through the mud, there is noth­ing I could do to stop that," she said.