BL-2023-NCL-000014 - [2025] EWHC 2074 (Ch)

Much of the funding for the 2022 Festival had been provided by the Defendant. At that time the Defendant was known as The Ticketline Network Limited (“Ticketline”). It has since been renamed as Orbit Tickets Limited, but for the purposes of this judgment I shall refer to it as “Ticketline”.

The Chief Executive Officer of Ticketline was Paul Betesh and in effect the company was owned almost entirely by him and members of his family. In layman’s terms, Mr Paul Betesh was the person behind Ticketline.

Ticketline acted as agent for SSD Music in selling tickets for the 2022 Festival (and other events organised by SSD Music).

The manner of funding by Ticketline was referred to as “forward funding”. In essence, Ticketline advanced sums by way of loan to SSD to enable SSD to fund festival costs prior to the relevant festival taking place. Although it was suggested to me that the idea was that advances were to be made for a specific event, from the proceeds of advance ticket sales for that event and ultimately repaid from the proceeds of later ticket sales for that event, a situation appears to have developed where there were simply general loans from Ticketline to SSD (in whole or large part structured as loans to IG Industries, SD Music’s parent company). I shall have to explore in more detail the exact nature of the relevant financial relationships.

Mr Betesh also became the majority shareholder in IG Industries and a director of the same in about June 2022, at which time IG Industries was renamed IG Industries Limited. This reflected the increasing financial exposure of the Defendant (and indirectly Mr Betesh) to IG Industries. A time came in 2022 when Ticketline (and Mr Betesh) was (were) unwilling to invest further sums into SSD Music and/or the 2022 Festival.