One of FanDuel’s founders has asked for arbitration to halt in a decades-long saga of investment, sales, and financial gain.
Nigel John Eccles challenged the finer details of sports betting company FanDuel’s sale to Paddy Power in 2018, which would then later become Flutter Entertainment LLC.
Eccles has now become the subject of an arbitration process by FanDuel, which he believes is a deliberate attempt to avoid or stall the major court case that surrounds the 2018 sale.
FanDuel founder rallies against arbitration
He and several early investors and cofounders believed that payments were withheld from the original deal and they have not been compensated to date.
They argue that the valuation of FanDuel at that time (2018), $559 million, was in favor of private equity shareholders who would stand to gain entirely from the equity of any merger deal.
Two years later Paddy Power’s parent company rebranded and with that change, the valuation of FanDuel was recorded at $4.2 billion. The company as part of Flutter Entertainment is valued at $20 billion currently.
Eccles told Front Office Sports, “We say the merger was great, it helped make FanDuel the success it is today. All we’re saying is the value of the merger was stolen by preferred shareholders. And we told them that before they closed the deal.”
The former CEO of FanDuel reputes the arbitration’s claims that he has been breaching an earlier agreement from 2017 and has also been “actively recruiting and assisting other plaintiffs” to sue Flutter.
Eccles, who has been battling Flutter for more than a decade said that the original boon that the private equity shared holders “secured for themselves and other preferred shareholders (represented) 100% of FanDuel’s equity in the new merged company along with the massive return it represented.”
He is looking for the sports betting giant to be brought to justice, but the court case has not been resolved despite a New York Court giving the case the green light to proceed.
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