Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum filed an antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday against Premier Boxing Champions and its financial backers that seeks damages of more than $100m.
According to Sportingnews.com, the 50-page suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, claims that Al Haymon, who operates Premier Boxing Champions and is a promoter for Floyd Mayweather, has blocked Top Rank from leasing venues for fights, prevented Top Rank from doing fights with its fighters and frozen the company out of the television market.
Top Rank claims that through Haymon’s fighter deals and time-buy arrangements with NBC, CBS and ABC as well as ESPN and other cable networks, other promoters are being locked out.
One example of Haymon’s “brazen illegal activities,” according to the lawsuit, was the April 15 fight between Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and Andrzej Fonfara, both Haymon clients. Haymon paid nearly $2m of Chavez’s “purse” for the bout, but Arum claims “paying the purse is a classic promoter responsibility, not the job of a true manager.”
According to the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, managers, such as Haymon are prohibited from also acting as promoters.
“The lawsuit filed by Bob Arum and Top Rank is entirely without merit and is a cynical attempt by boxing’s old guard to use the courts to undermine the accessibility, credibility and exposure of boxing that the sport so desperately needs,” a spokesman for the firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP wrote.
The lawsuit comes two months after Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions filed a similar lawsuit seeking $300m in damages from Haymon and his investment firm Waddell & Reed, which Arum’s attorneys say has committed more than $400m to build Premier Boxing Champions while taking large losses.
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