Asha Javeed

Lead Ed­i­tor In­ves­ti­ga­tions

asha.javeed@guardian.co.tt

Three days af­ter the fail­ure to launch Star Net­work, a mo­bile so­lu­tions op­tion for cus­tomers, own­er Keron Les Pierre was asked to leave the In­vaders Bay co-work­ing space where he had set up shop.

Last week, Les Pierre had a botched launch of an event that he has said would rev­o­lu­tionise the mo­bile in­dus­try.

His pitch was to sell phones and lap­tops at $1.

“The launch event is sched­uled to take place at Lev­el 2, In­vaders Bay Tow­er, lo­cat­ed ad­ja­cent to Movi­eTowne in Port-of-Spain,” the press state­ment had said.

How­ev­er, it was shut down af­ter hun­dreds of peo­ple showed up for an event that was es­sen­tial­ly a one-man op­er­a­tion.

Les Pierre was us­ing the co-work­ing space by Re­gus, the world’s largest provider of flex­i­ble work­space which cur­rent­ly rents space with­in the Wood­side Build­ing for its Port-of-Spain Busi­ness Cen­tre.

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian last week at Guardian Me­dia’s St Vin­cent Street of­fice, Les Pierre, the CEO of Star, said that the man­age­ment asked him to ter­mi­nate their arrange­ment which he had in place since 2018, giv­en the un­ex­pect­ed crowds and chaos which re­sult­ed in ten­ant­ed peo­ple not be­ing able to ac­cess the build­ing.

The Sun­day Guardian un­der­stands that the pack­age he ini­tial­ly pur­chased from the Re­gus was an ad­dress-on­ly pack­age, which would al­low him to re­ceive mail and use the ad­dress for busi­ness pur­pos­es.

How­ev­er, be­fore the launch, he had rent­ed the fa­cil­i­ty’s board­room which is avail­able for up-to-date paid ten­ants.

The Sun­day Guardian was told that no no­ti­fi­ca­tion was giv­en to Re­gus for a launch event and that on the day that left ten­ants blind­sided by the crowds.

In a com­ment on the mat­ter, Stephanie Ques­nel, Re­gus’ gen­er­al man­ag­er said, “At Re­gus, we have poli­cies and pro­ce­dures in place that must be ad­hered to by all clients across our glob­al net­work of 3,500 cen­tres. These poli­cies are in place to en­sure a safe and pro­fes­sion­al en­vi­ron­ment for all our clients. In this in­stance, our ad­dress was utilised with­out any au­tho­ri­sa­tion in which to do so and sub­se­quent­ly caused a large in­flux of mem­bers of the pub­lic un­ex­pect­ed­ly show­ing up to our lo­ca­tion. The sce­nario was in breach of many of our claus­es and re­sult­ed in us hav­ing no choice but to ter­mi­nate ser­vice.”

A section of the crowd gathered at Invaders Bay, Port-of-Spain, for the launch.

KERWIN PIERRE

Didn’t read the fine print

While ex­cit­ed by the in­ter­est, Les Pierre, 36, said the sit­u­a­tion could have been avoid­ed if cus­tomers had read the fine print.

But what ex­act­ly is that fine print?

Here’s what it is:

It’s not a sep­a­rate mo­bile en­ti­ty. Rather, Star is us­ing sims from Dig­i­cel for its de­vices which would run on the Dig­i­cel net­work.

The Sun­day Guardian un­der­stands that Les Pierre se­cured 10,000 Dig­i­cel sims for the phones.

Cus­tomers who choose to ac­quire the de­vices at $1, would be signed on to a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice which they would have to pay for month­ly. The $1 would be the ini­tial cost of hard­ware on­ly. So, the full cost of the de­vice would be cov­ered over time with the cost of the sub­scrip­tion. Ul­ti­mate­ly, Dig­i­cel is the end provider ser­vice on ei­ther de­vice.

The hard­ware–the phones and lap­top–are man­u­fac­tured by an “Asian” firm specif­i­cal­ly for Les Pierre. The soft­ware is pro­vid­ed by Mi­crosoft’s af­fil­i­ate PC Clin­ic. He did not dis­close the ex­act lo­ca­tion or com­pa­ny from which it is be­ing sourced.

The “fine print” was not made pub­lic or dis­closed to cus­tomers in the com­pa­ny’s re­lease.

In­stead, the press re­lease led cus­tomers to be­lieve that there was a third mo­bile op­er­a­tor with de­vices for $1.

When the Sun­day Guardian point­ed out that the fine print was not in­clud­ed in the press re­lease and per­haps it was disin­gen­u­ous to omit that it was pow­ered by an ex­ist­ing mo­bile ser­vices provider, Les Pierre ac­knowl­edged that more in­for­ma­tion should have been pro­vid­ed to po­ten­tial cus­tomers.

The press re­lease led to TSTT’s chief ex­ec­u­tive Lisa Agard is­su­ing a swift call of ac­tion to the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) to in­ter­vene.

Les Pierre, who has a diplo­ma in mar­ket­ing from the School of Ac­count­ing and Man­age­ment, said that the on­ly re­buke he re­ceived from TATT who vis­it­ed on the day was to re­move the word ‘mo­bile’ from their tag.

In his view, his launch was suc­cess­ful.

Who is Les Pierre?

Les Pierre ac­knowl­edged that there was scep­ti­cism about the op­er­a­tion in the pub­lic do­main, and he had heard the de­scrip­tions of him­self as a “con man” and a “smart­man”.

In­stead, he de­scribes him­self as “a vi­sion­ary and an en­tre­pre­neur.”

Last year, Les Pierre, in his ca­pac­i­ty as CEO of Grapes Tech­nol­o­gy, was among the fi­nal­ists of the en­tre­pre­neur­ship cat­e­go­ry at T&T’s Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness Awards 2022.

At the time, Les Pierre, a young en­tre­pre­neur, was hailed as one of the Youth Busi­ness of T&T’s (YBTT) many suc­cess sto­ries.

“Les Pierre cre­at­ed an on­line tu­tor­ing ser­vice called GRAPES (Good Reme­dies A Par­ent Should Ex­er­cise So­cial­ly) which equips chil­dren (from child­hood to sec­ondary school) with all the sup­port nec­es­sary to re­alise their fullest po­ten­tial. Les Pierre re­ceived fi­nan­cial and men­tor­ing sup­port for his busi­ness from YBTT,” their FB mes­sage on his achieve­ment said.

He said that GRAPES was an on­line pro­gramme for chil­dren of­fer­ing lessons in math­e­mat­ics, Eng­lish, and psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port.

This was pre-COVID.

And the $1 Lap­top for Bet­ter Schools ini­tia­tive was born in ear­ly 2018.

The ser­vice was avail­able by sub­scrip­tion and Les Pierre said he had 8,000 sub­scribers.

He said dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, there was a need to have more de­vices and he was able to source the de­vices from the Asian mar­ket and of­fer it at cost price.

Les Pierre brand­ed the lap­tops and phones and Star was born with the abil­i­ty to of­fer the ser­vice na­tion­al­ly.

He con­cedes that some chil­dren who used the lap­tops found them flim­sy with not enough mem­o­ry but said that com­plaints are made about most prod­ucts.

The Star team are Mar­i­on Jones-Scott and Shakedar Veris and Les Pierre.

Fi­nan­cial trou­bles

Les Pierre ad­mit­ted that he ran in­to fi­nan­cial trou­bles with a firm he hired to help him.

The firm, First­line Se­cu­ri­ties, had agreed to fi­nance a $3.2 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty but the deal fell through.

When a val­u­a­tion was done on the col­lat­er­al for the fi­nan­cial fa­cil­i­ty, a prop­er­ty in Pe­nal for which he want­ed to build hous­es, it was val­ued low­er than he had pro­ject­ed it to be worth.

In ad­di­tion, he said, First­line said they could not get any­one to buy in­to the in­vest­ment.

At the time, he said he had al­ready re­ceived $150,000 from First­line Se­cu­ri­ties.

But un­able to com­plete the fi­nanc­ing of the deal, Les Pierre said it land­ed him in­to some chal­lenges with his cred­it cards.

This pushed back his launch, which was sup­posed to be ear­li­er in the year, as he couldn’t cov­er the cost of de­vices.

He said First­line has since is­sued him a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter to re­pay sums which in­clud­ed in­ter­est, and mon­ey ex­pend­ed and he had en­gaged an at­tor­ney and was deal­ing with the mat­ter. He did not want to dis­close ex­act­ly why First­line was su­ing him. For its part, First­line’s chief ex­ec­u­tive Kei­th King sim­ply an­swered: “Fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, no com­ment.”

Les Pierre said that he in­tends to re-launch at an­oth­er lo­ca­tion as he was en­thused by the re­sponse.

He said that he will work with an ap­point­ment sys­tem mov­ing for­ward.

“What we are go­ing to do on so­cial me­dia is post what day and time you can come back as it is go­ing to be an ap­point­ment sys­tem, so, for now, you can log on to In­sta­gram and Face­book, where you will give us an email and we will then do it through an on­line ap­point­ment sys­tem to man­age the crowd,” he said.