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Fyre Festival lawsuits now number ten

By | Published on Monday 15 May 2017

Fyre Festival

For those keeping count, organisers of the doomed Fyre Festival are now facing at least ten lawsuits. We say “at least” because whenever we report on one of these, another bit of litigation pops up almost as soon as we’ve published the story.

Financial backers of the failed luxury island party were the latest to join the lawsuit party last week, alongside pissed off ticketholders and suppliers.

According to the New York Post, New Yorker Oleg Itkin says he provided $700,000 to the Fyre company earlier this year after seeing paperwork that showed expected revenues of $932 million by the end of the year. Those somewhat ambitious financial projects were seemingly based on what Team Fyre hoped to bring in from both their festival and the talent booking app it was designed to launch.

Itkin says that Fyre Media co-founder Billy McFarland also showed him a balance sheet that claimed the company had $31 million in assets as of January this year, which included an $8.4 million fee paid by the Bahamian government to promote the islands. The lawsuit alleges that that payment likely didn’t exist. Either way, Itkin wants his money back plus $250,000 to cover his legal costs.

Meanwhile, money firm EHL Funding says it loaned McFarland and his co-founder Ja Rule $3 million just eighteen days before the disastrous Fyre Festival faltered. According to TMZ, weekly payments were then due to be made to EHL which stopped on 21 Apr. So now the company is suing for its $3 million back plus interest.

Add to that yet another class action filed by an angry ticketholder, this one in a Manhattan federal court, plus the seven lawsuits we’ve already reported on, and you have your ten bits of Fyre Festival litigation all lined up ready to go.

Neither McFarland nor Ja Rule have as yet responded to any of the legal action. Though, according to Variety, the former is reportedly in talks with communications firm FTI Consulting about it providing some crisis management and reputation repair services. Yeah, good luck with that.



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