Baseline Ventures wins arbitration, Volleyball Federation asked to pay Rs 4 crore

MUMBAI: Sports marketing firm Baseline Ventures, which organised the first season of the Pro Volleyball League in February 2019, has won the wrongful termination case against the Volleyball Federation of India (VFI).

Justice (Retd) K Kannan, the Madras high court-appointed arbitrator, has awarded Rs 4 crore plus interest as damages and legal fees to Baseline Ventures in its dispute against VFI for the ‘wrongful termination’ of the 10-year contract for Pro Volleyball League.

VFI had terminated the agreement with Baseline Venture on November 18th, 2019, alleging financial irregularities and manipulation by the firm.

After almost 10 months of arbitration, Kannan ruled against VFI stating that there was no ground to terminate Baseline’s contract, and moreover, the federation did not follow due process to terminate the contract.

The arbitrator has also dismissed all allegations made by VFI against Baseline pertaining to the breach of contract.

In its order, a copy of which was accessed by ET, the arbitrator noted that if VFI had the players interest in mind and wanted to foster the sport as a popular entertainment, it ought to have known that closing all options and terminating the agreement was too big a price to pay.

“In the light of my finding that the respondent’s (VFI) termination of contract was not justified, the claim for damages estimated based on initial projections is not tenable. The respondent killed the goose that laid golden eggs,” Kannan said while dismissing the counter claim of Rs 14.93 crore made by the VFI against Baseline Ventures.

“This judgement is a total vindication of the fact that the VFI had absolutely no grounds to terminate the contract after a successful season,” said Joy Bhattacharjya, VP at Baseline Ventures, who led the first edition of the league as its CEO. “It’s important that they are held accountable not just to us, but to all the volleyball players and coaches who were the most impacted by their wilful actions. This is a victory for fair play in Indian sport.”

The arbitrator has also asked Baseline Ventures to hand over the IPR of the Pro Volleyball League to VFI.

Tuhin Mishra, co-founder and MD, Baseline Ventures, said, “When we started legal proceedings, we had the option of whether we wanted our rights to conduct and market the league reinstated apart from the damages which we were looking at.”

However, he added that given the “capricious nature” of VFI’s actions over the past year, the company had absolutely no confidence that this nature of event would not happen again considering the “blatant display of malafide intent” on the federation’s part.

“So we voluntarily gave up the option of reinstatement of our rights even before the proceedings. We are happy to hand over the logo rights to VFI, we just want our damages to be paid before any commercial agreements are executed by VFI,” Mishra said.

VFI had cited a report by one of the big four audit and consulting firms, which it claimed corroborated the manipulations of the accounts by Baseline and VFI had used that report supposedly to terminate the agreement with Baseline.

However, the firm in question later backtracked and forwarded an application to the arbitrator to eschew the report on the ground that it was meant to be confidential by the terms of their engagement by the respondent (VFI).

There had been a disclaimer that it was not meant to be an auditor’s report and they had only examined whatever documents were presented by the respondent and it’s views did not have any legal standing.

The firm had not even consulted Baseline while verifying the documents which VFI had given them.

Based on an earlier judgement, VFI had to pay up Rs 2.25 crore to Baseline, which was received by the company in February 2020.