KLE owners drop Bolt from company name, position for listing
Published:Wednesday | November 2, 2011 | 12:00 AM
The owners of Kingston Live Entertainment Limited (KLE) have removed Usain Bolt's name from one-year-old subsidiary Usain Bolt Tracks and Records Company Limited.
The sports bar company, as indicated by a press advertisement this week, will now be known as T&R Limited.
The move does not mean, however, that Bolt is no longer involved in the company launched in 2010 as a vehicle to market a new entertainment brand in Jamaica and Europe, leveraging the celebrity status of the Olympian and world record holder.
Rather, it is a prelude to the planned year-end listing on the Junior Stock Exchange, according to well-placed sources who say the KLE group structure is being reorganised in preparation for going public. Pan Caribbean Financial Services is the lead broker on the pending offer.
KLE is currently backed by seven investors, who initially invested US$1 million in the Bolt-branded sports bar, which opened in Kingston and was later expanded to Falmouth, the capital of Bolt's home parish Trelawny, and home of Jamaica's newest cruise port; another is scheduled to open in London in time for the Olympics in 2012.
KLE also owns Fiction nightclub, created in 2008.
At the moment, KLE principals David and Stephen Shirley, Gary and Tina Matalon, Kevin Bourke, Craig Powell and Zuar Jarrett are keeping mum about timelines and other details of the planned listing, until all due diligence is complete.
What is clear, however, is that the group, with its complex shareholding arrangements, is being restructured.
The stake held by Bolt in T&R is not known.