In a court case, Munich-based media services company MX1 alleges its former managers stole its customers, reports Globes.
“The case concerns concrete deceit and fraud by three very senior employees of MX1. The three conspired to steal the company’s customers and use its commercial secrets in order to found a competing business. They did this not only after leaving their jobs in the company (during which they received huge sums of money), but also when they were still employed by MX1.”
These allegations were made as part of a NIS 60 million (EUR15 million) lawsuit at an Israeli court filed last December against former MX1 executives CFO Shmuel Koren, global sales manager Shalom Izkovitz, and Europe and Middle East sales manager Rami Goldberg.
The report in Globes says that the lawsuit alleges that while being employed by MX1, the three former executives took action to transfer the company’s customers to a competing company they had founded in the British Virgin Islands and Switzerland, for which they work to this day. The company is the iKO Media Group AG, registered in Switzerland, and operating a teleport in Rome.
Asked for comment, SES spokesperson Markus Payer emailed Broadband TV News: “We cannot comment on ongoing litigations. In this case, it is just to note that it will not have a financially material impact on SES.”
One example of the transfer of a client can be found on the website of Austrian media regulator RTR, where there is a document detailing how the channel 24-tv from Connect Media GmbH was transferred from RR Media to iKO Media (regulatory approval was needed for this).
MX1 is the result of a merger between SES Platform Services and RR Media. In Feburary 2016, SES Platform Services GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of SES S.A. has agreed to merge RR Media’s operations with those of SES Platform Services. SES acquired RR Media for $13.291 per share, leading to an enterprise value of $242.2 million.