MANY punters would have noticed that the Overnight racing programme for tomorrow’s card was not published as usual on Wednesday evening.

There was only a small number of entries received by the Racing Office of the promoting company prompting Racing Secretary, Denzil Miller to extend entry time to 10:30 yesterday.

The bone of contention was the increase in purse money. CTL had originally offered stakeholders a 7.5 per cent increase, which was soundly rejected. That rejection led to the majority of trainers not nominating their horses for tomorrow’s race programme. But following a meeting of the stakeholders and CTL yesterday morning an agreement was reached, thereby saving the Betting Gaming and Lotteries Commission (BGLC)-sponsored race day.

Chairman of CTL, Christopher Brown, in a statement issued after the agreement was brokered said: “I am very pleased with the decision of the stakeholders to accept the offer of 7.5% and to proceed with the nomination of horses for the BGLC race day for this Saturday August 1, 2015. We had further discussions with them to indicate how we had proposed to allocate that increase and that in fact, within the overall allocation, some of the lower Grades would have seen increases of up to 14%. The total increase, however, has remained at 7.5%.”

Brown indicated in his statement that the board of CTL fully understands the plight of the stakeholders and appreciated the fact that over the past three years they have been working with the Board and the management for the resuscitation of the industry.

“Despite the challenges, we have seen profit up to this time for the first time since the start of the fiscal year. Telephone betting continues to grow, we are bringing on more bookmaking outlets to operate as OTBs (based on our agreement with Post to Post), our sales are increasing, and we are now finally on the verge of exporting our signal to North America, which will move this business to another realm in terms of our sales and growth agenda. Though we remain a heavily indebted company ($1.2billion), this debt is reducing, we are also cutting our costs, and our losses have also been significantly lowered,” Brown said.