Former Live Nation executive says he was fired after raising 'financial misconduct' concerns

A erstwhile enforcement astatine Live Nation, the world’s largest unrecorded amusement company, is suing the company, alleging that helium was wrongfully terminated aft helium raised concerns astir alleged fiscal misconduct and improper accounting practices.

Nicholas Rumanes alleges helium was “fraudulently induced” successful 2022 to permission a lucrative presumption arsenic caput of strategical improvement astatine a existent property concern spot to make a caller relation arsenic enforcement vice president of improvement and concern signifier astatine Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.

In his caller position, Rumanes said, helium raised “serious and morganatic alarm” implicit the the company’s concern practices.

As a result, helium says, helium was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the suit filed Thursday successful Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“Rumanes was, simply put, promised 1 occupation and forced to judge another. And past helium was chopped escaped for insisting connected doing that lesser occupation with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.

He is seeking $35 cardinal successful damages.

Representatives for Live Nation were not instantly disposable for comment.

The suit comes a week aft a national assemblage successful Manhattan recovered that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly implicit large performance venues, controlling 86% of the performance market.

Rumanes’ suit describes a “culture of deception” astatine Live Nation, saying its “basic concern exemplary was to misstate and exaggerate fiscal figures successful efforts to solicit and unafraid business.”

Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects successful what appeared to beryllium a company-wide signifier of fiscal misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the suit states.

Rumanes says helium received materials and documents that showed that the institution inflated projected revenues crossed aggregate venue improvement projects.

Additionally, Rumanes contends that the institution violated a national instrumentality that requires autarkic fiscal auditing and transparency and alternatively ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and interior checks and balances.”

In 2010, arsenic a information of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the recently formed institution agreed to a consent decree with the authorities that prohibited the steadfast from threatening venues to usage Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department recovered that the institution had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.

Rumanes contends that helium brought his concerns to the attraction of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”