Ticketfly has been given clearance to sue the organisers of the scrapped Pemberton Music Festival in Canada over more than US$6m in ticket refunds.
Pemberton, the annual four-day event in British Columbia, was cancelled and declared bankrupt in May last year after it was revealed it had lost C$47m (£28m/US$35) in three years.
Those who had paid up to $1,000 for event tickets during three months of sales were told to seek refunds through their credit card companies, which then passed on $7.9m of ‘chargeback’ costs to exclusive ticket vendor Ticketfly.
The Eventbrite-owned ticket company initially failed in its attempts to recover costs via trustee Ernst & Young, with courts ruling it had signed an agreement with contractor Huka Entertainment, not PMFLP, the bankrupt event producer.
However, the Vancouver Sun newspaper reports that Justice Nitya Iyer, in the British Columbia Supreme Court, has now set aside a previous decision after taking into consideration that PMFLP had been drawing on ticketing revenues prior to the event’s cancellation.
Ticketfly now has until the end of the month to submit documents detailing each ticket holder’s purchase and financial institution that processed the refund in pursuit of its claim.
Strangely, Ticketfly is still promoting Pemberton on its website, encouraging potential attendees to “let the adventure begin”.
In June Ticketfly services were down for more than four days due to a cyberattack that affected thousands of event operators and potentially left 26 million customers’ data exposed.
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