SMAM seeking Delhi 2010 compensation 31/08/2010 |
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Sports Marketing and Management (SMAM), the Australian company fired by Delhi Commonwealth Games organisers for alleged "non-performance", is seeking up to $12m (£7.7m) in compensation.
SMAM managing director Mike Bushell claims his company is owed the money for helping Delhi 2010 raise a record $85m (£54.5m) in sponsorship for this year's Games.
SMAM was dismissed by Delhi officials after Indian Railways, the Games' biggest backers, complained that money meant for the event was being used to pay the agency commission.
But Bushell told Inside The Games that allegations SMAM was involved in any wrongdoing were totally without foundation.
He said: "It’s very hard to be corrupt when you haven’t been paid anything.”
SMAM has previously worked on the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2002 and 2006 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and Melbourne.
However, Bushell continued: "India is India. We expected things not to be as if we were working in Australia or in the UK. But at the same time we did not expect anything like this.
"We weren’t able to do our job that we had always been able to do in previous Games and in the way it should have been undertaken.
"As a consequence we would probably have been able to raise a lot more if we had been able to do that.
"We have done our job – it’s a record [amount of sponsorship] for the Commonwealth Games. It's bigger than Melbourne [for the 2006 Games]."
Bushell claims that SMAM has spent about $5m (£3.2m) in staffing an office of 12 workers in India and travelling around the world to find sponsors for the Games.
He added: "The position we are in now is that we obviously want to be paid for what we’ve done. We’ve had massive expense.
"We believe our so-called dismissal was unlawful. All the legal advice we’ve had is that they [Delhi 2010] had no right to do so.
"There was no commitment in our contract to achieve a guaranteed number [of sales].
"There were agreed targets but it was purely an agreed target, best endeavours, let’s go for it and work with each other to achieve it. So to say it’s non-performance is impossible to do."
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