A former executive at Live Nation, the worldโs largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was โfraudulently inducedโ in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised โserious and legitimate alarmโ over the the companyโs business practices.
As a result, he says, he was โunlawfully terminated,โ according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
โRumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,โ according to the lawsuit.
He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanesโ lawsuit describes a โculture of deceptionโ at Live Nation, saying its โbasic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.โ
Such practices โspanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,โ the lawsuit states.
Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation โthrough a centralized, opaque structureโ that enables it to โbypass oversight and internal checks and balances.โ
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the companyโs management, but his warnings were โrepeatedly ignored.โ