Cherisse Moe

MA­JOR­I­TY state-owned TSTT yes­ter­day con­firmed that a com­pa­ny owned by West In­dies crick­et icon, Bri­an Lara, was one of the main con­trac­tors for its Feb­ru­ary 18 con­cert with Be­y­once, one of the biggest mu­si­cal stars in the world. LAY Man­age­ment, a com­pa­ny joint­ly owned by Lara and lo­cal foot­ball icon Dwight Yorke, has been re­tained by TSTT to help in the co­or­di­na­tion and lo­gis­tics as­so­ci­at­ed with the event in­fra­struc­ture, said TSTT spokesman Graeme Suite. TSTT's ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent of mo­bile ser­vices, Lisa Agard, said LAY Man­age­ment would as­sume re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the venue mi­nus stage, sound and lights when the coun­try's largest telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider signs the con­tract.

Most of the work in­volved in putting on the show – in­clud­ing the stage, sound, lights, ac­com­mo­da­tion, trans­porta­tion and se­cu­ri­ty–will be han­dled by events man­ag­er Sean Bur­kett, who has done sim­i­lar work on TSTT con­certs in­volv­ing top record­ing artistes Kanye West, Ri­han­na, Ani­ta Bak­er and John Leg­end. Be­y­once is com­ing to Trinidad with an en­tourage of 80 peo­ple, in­clud­ing her band, dancers, se­cu­ri­ty and tech­ni­cal ad­vis­ers. Ques­tioned on the pos­si­bil­i­ty the show, ex­pect­ed to be one of the largest ever in the coun­try, could be moved to the Queen's Park Oval from the Sa­van­nah, Agard said: "Com­mer­cial­ly, it makes much bet­ter sense to have the con­cert at a venue with pre-ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture like the Oval rather than hav­ing to build the in­fra­struc­ture from scratch."

Whichev­er venue is even­tu­al­ly agreed, Agard said TSTT was hop­ing for a sold-out crowd of 25,000: 4,000 VVIP tick­ets at $1,600 each; 8,000 VIP tick­ets at $1,000 each and 13,000 gen­er­al ad­mis­sion tick­ets at $450 each. Suite, mean­while, dis­missed re­ports TSTT was pulling back from its in­volve­ment in the 2010 Car­ni­val be­cause of its spon­sor­ship of the Be­y­once con­cert. He al­so dis­missed claims TSTT was spend­ing $10 mil­lion to bring Gram­my award-win­ning R&B songstress Be­y­once to per­form in this coun­try. Suite de­scribed as "lu­di­crous" and "gross­ly in­ac­cu­rate," a re­port in an­oth­er news­pa­per that TSTT was putting a $10 mil­lion dent in the pub­lic's purse to bring the su­per­star to T&T.

Suite said while he could not di­vulge the fi­nan­cial de­tails of the agree­ment, "we can cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly state that the re­port is false and the union's es­ti­mates are gross­ly ex­ag­ger­at­ed and in­ac­cu­rate." Suite al­so dis­missed claims by pres­i­dent of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers' Union (CWU), Joseph Re­my, that the cost of stag­ing the event would af­fect any set­tle­ment of the col­lec­tive agree­ment with the union. "The host­ing of the con­cert will in no way im­pact or com­pro­mise the even­tu­al set­tle­ment of the col­lec­tive agree­ment with the CWU," he said. "Both par­ties met be­fore the In­dus­tri­al Court since No­vem­ber last year. The court is still hear­ing the mater and will make its de­ci­sion."