Ticketfly can recover funds from music festival, judge says

A judge has allowed Ticketfly Canada to try to recover funds it lost after the Pemberton Music Festival was cancelled and its producers filed for bankruptcy last year.

In 2017, the festival was scrapped after it was revealed the event had lost $47 million over three years.

After the event’s producers — known as Pemberton Music Festival Limited Partnership (PMFLP) — filed for bankruptcy and Ernst & Young named the trustee, ticket holders were told to seek refunds through their credit card companies.

The credit card companies then paid out the ticket holders and charged the cost of the tickets back to Ticketfly, leaving them with “chargebacks” to the tune of $7.9 million. Ticketfly then applied to the trustee to recover its costs, but was rejected twice based on the trustee’s claim that Ticketfly had signed an agreement with Huka Entertainment to be the exclusive ticket vendor, not PMFLP. Huka Entertainment was contracted by the PMFLP to organize and produce the festival.

In a B.C. Supreme Court judgment dated Aug. 3, Justice Nitya Iyer set aside a previous decision that said the trustee was permitted to reject Ticketfly’s claims, since the producers had previously told Ticketfly to remit to the PMFLP any revenue collected through advanced ticket sales.