Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

The pro­mot­er of the flopped Adid­ja “Vy­bz Kar­tel” Palmer con­cert says he is now fear­ful for his life.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Odane An­der­son, who runs Ja­cho En­ter­tain­ment, said he was now in trou­ble be­cause he had to bor­row mon­ey to fund the con­cert and is now find­ing dif­fi­cul­ty in pay­ing it back.

“Kar­tel said the fans get robbed, his sup­port­ers get robbed. I get robbed too be­cause right now my life is in dan­ger be­cause of bor­row­ing in­vestors’ mon­ey; (I) can­not pay it back. The share­hold­ers have to get paid. Oth­er ser­vice sup­pli­ers have to get paid. So, my next step is to try to find com­mon grounds to work it out,” An­der­son said. 

Po­lice on Tues­day said it was look­ing in­to the fi­nan­cial deal­ings of Ja­cho En­ter­tain­ment, af­ter it was re­vealed an ini­tial US$950,000 was paid to Kar­tel to head­line last Sat­ur­day’s One Caribbean Mu­sic Fes­ti­val. 

Palmer was con­tract­ed for a to­tal of US $1.35 mil­lion to per­form at the con­cert, which al­so fea­tured oth­er for­eign acts in­clud­ing Malie Donn, Rvss­ian, Siz­zla Kalon­ji, Chron­ic Law and Moliy. 

How­ev­er, af­ter Kar­tel, Malie Donn, Rvss­ian, Siz­zla and Moliy pulled out of the con­cert cit­ing con­trac­tu­al is­sues, Chron­ic Law was the on­ly for­eign act who per­formed.

An­der­son has de­fend­ed how he sourced the US funds for the for­eign acts, say­ing it was done above board.

Lead­ing up to the con­cert, De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge had raised con­cerns over some items on Kar­tel’s itin­er­ary and de­barred some of them, re­sult­ing in some of changes be­ing made to the artiste’s in­tend­ed sched­ule. 

Yes­ter­day, An­der­son said it was this that trig­gered Kar­tel’s re­luc­tance to come to the coun­try. How­ev­er, he ar­gued that this should have been ad­dressed rather than Kar­tel aban­don­ing his fans. 

“My prob­lem is not him can­celling, my prob­lem is the time he do it. If he knew he was un­com­fort­able with the Gov­ern­ment re­stric­tion on him, I find weeks be­fore or days be­fore he could have said it and make a no­tice to the pub­lic, ‘Well, I’m not com­fort­able per­form­ing in Trinidad at the mo­ment be­cause of the stance the Gov­ern­ment take’ and I would make prepa­ra­tions to post­pone the show to move for­ward,” An­der­son said. 

De­spite An­der­son’s claim, Kar­tel had tak­en to so­cial me­dia in­di­cat­ing to his fans that he had no is­sues with the T&T Gov­ern­ment’s ac­tion.

“The prob­lem lies in where the pro­mot­er took it up­on him­self and to try to fill Vy­bz Kar­tel itin­er­ary with things that had noth­ing to do with Vy­bz Kar­tel per­for­mance. And right­ful­ly so, the De­fence Min­is­ter pull the plug on that part of the itin­er­ary. And there is no prob­lem there be­cause Vy­bz Kar­tel rep­re­sent for Trinidad, rep­re­sent for Ja­maica, as a mat­ter of fact, rep­re­sent for the en­tire Caribbean.”

Yes­ter­day, An­der­son al­so said up to hours be­fore the con­cert, he had of­fered to shut­tle Kar­tel in­to the coun­try via a pri­vate jet but that was re­ject­ed, along with oth­er fac­tors to ad­dress Kar­tel’s con­cerns of a fi­nan­cial breach in his con­tract. 

An­der­son said his at­tor­neys had writ­ten to the at­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing the artistes who failed to per­form re­quest­ing that they de­tail what were the sup­posed breach­es in their con­tracts be­fore pro­ceed­ing.