Baseline Ventures wins case against VFI, federation ordered to pay Rs 4 cr and interest

Baseline Venture (India) Pvt Ltd has won their case against the Volleyball Federation of India (VFI) after the federation terminated the contract wrongfully as per Baseline. The VFI has been ordered to pay Rs 4 crores as compensation and Rs 5 lakhs in legal fees. With that, an additional 12 percent interest from the date of commencement of arbitral proceedings till the date of payment. This amounts to approximately an additional Rs 45 lakhs in interest payment as of Monday.

The judgement was delivered by Justice K Kannan (Retd.,) after almost ten months of hearings and submissions by both parties. All the allegations by VFI against Baseline pertaining to the breach of contract have been dismissed and it has been categorically stated that the termination was not justified, as per the release.

The judgement further dismissed the counter-claim of Rs. 14.93 crores made by the VFI against Baseline Ventures.

Speaking on the occasion, Baseline vice president Joy Bhattacharjya, who helmed the league for its first season, said this is a "victory for fair play in Indian sport."

"This judgement is a total vindication of the fact that the VFI had absolutely no grounds to terminate the contract after a successful season. It's important that they are held accountable not just to us, but to all the volleyball players and coaches who were the most impacted by their willful actions. This is a victory for fair play in Indian sport," Bhattacharjya said in a statement.

Baseline Ventures are to hand over the IPR of the PVL to the VFI. Tuhin Mishra, co-founder and managing director, Baseline Ventures, said: "When we started legal proceedings, we had the option of whether we wanted our rights to conduct and market the league reinstated apart from the damages which we were looking at. Given the capricious nature of VFI's actions over the past year, we had absolutely no confidence that this nature of event would not happen again, considering the blatant display of malafide intent on the federation's part and more valuable money would be lost by all stakeholders including Baseline who were paying crores of money to be associated with the league. So we voluntarily gave up the option of reinstatement of our rights even before the proceedings. We are happy to hand over the logo rights to VFI, we just want our damages to be paid before any commercial agreements are executed by VFI."

Based on an earlier judgement, VFI had to pay up Rs 2.25 crores to Baseline, which was received in February 2020.

( With inputs from ANI )