This is extremely interesting. Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports has the story.
Zuffa LLC, the parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Extreme Cagefighting, has filed suit against Ken Pavia, one of the sport's most prominent fighter agents, alleging Pavia passed along trade secrets and confidential Zuffa documents to rival mixed martial arts promotion Bellator.
The suit alleges that Bellator used the documents to help run its business.
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According to the suit, filed Wednesday in Clark County District Court, Pavia delivered confidential contracts, including fighter agreements, to Bellator after being asked to do so in a July 4 email to him from Bellator founder Bjorn Rebney.
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An email which Zuffa's lawsuit alleges is from Rebney to Pavia on July 4 was attached as an exhibit to the 16-page suit. In it, Rebney writes, " ... You've been great about sending us ‘All' of the seminal docs from the UFC, so that we can re-do them and implement them for Bellator."
Later, the email Zuffa alleges to have been written by Rebney continues, "Please list each in terms of what it is for and how the UFC uses them/implements them. ... Then I'm going to have our team Monday re-type them and we will sufficiently alter them such that they will appear to be ours and not theirs."
I suggest reading the entire story for all the details, but it's very interesting.
Outside of Bellator and Pavia, the suit also names two other unnamed defendants, Iole reports.
If it ever comes out, it will be interesting to see where Zuffa obtained the e-mail communication between Rebney and Pavia from and how this will affect the relationship between Pavia's talent roster and the UFC. Pavia represents UFC fighters Anthony Johnson, Ben Saunders, Chris Lytle and Martin Kampmann among others.
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