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Settlement reached in Electric Picnic dispute

By | Published on Friday 16 May 2014

Electric Picnic

A legal dispute between the companies behind Ireland’s Electric Picnic festival has been settled just before it was due to reach a court room in Dublin this week.

The company of Electric Picnic founder John Reynolds, POD Music, claimed that UK festival maker and Live Nation subsidiary Festival Republic, which bought a majority stake in the Irish event in 2009, had breached a shareholders agreement in freezing him out of certain decision making processes.

According to the Irish Times, Reynolds also claimed that decisions made by Festival Republic regarding the 2012 and 2013 editions of Electric Picnic had been damaging to his company. For its part, Festival Republic argued that Reynolds had engaged in a “deliberately obstructive pattern of behaviour”, possibly as part of a bid to force the Live Nation company to buy out his shares at a “grossly inflated price”.

Part of the dispute centred on the volume discounting of tickets for the event, and the judge overseeing the case had secured orders that would have forced Ticketmaster to share information about volume discounts that were agreed on tickets for Electric Picnic from 2009 to 2013.

But in the end no such revelations were required, because at the last minute a confidential out of court settlement was reached. The judge adjourned the case until 3 Jun so that the settlement can be implemented, at which date the Irish office of Festival Republic says it expects the whole case to be struck out.



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