Baseline Ventures wins case against VFI ,Court ordered Federation to Pay Rs 4 Crore and Interest

Baseline Ventures(India) Pvt Ltd has won their case against Volleyball Federation of India after the latter terminated the former contract wrongfully as per Baseline. The Federation will be paying Rs 4 crore as compensation and Rs 5 lakhs in legal fees apart from that they will be paying 12 per cent interest from the date of commencement of arbitral proceedings till the date of payment which means an additional amount of Rs 45 Lakhs in interest will be paid by Federation to Baseline till Monday.

The case which was going for approximately 10 months came to conclusion after hearing the judgement from Justice K Kanan(Retd) based on the cases presented by both parties. All the allegation which was imposed by VFI on Baseline Ventures have been dismissed regarding breaching contracts and it was stated by Justice Kanan that the termination was not justified at all. Also, the claim by VFI regarding Rs 14.93 crores against Baseline Ventures has been dismissed.  After receiving the judgement in their favor Baseline Vice President Joy Bhattacharya said “Its a win 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.

Also on this occasion 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.”

The Volleyball Federation of India was founded in 1951 is responsible for conducting all operations, organizing events related Volleyball. Before Volleyball Federation of India was created, the game was controlled by Indian Olympic Association(IOA) also at that time the Volleyball Interstate tournament was organized after every 2 years starting from 1936 to 1950 for men only. The First Interstate Volleyball Championship was held in Lahore(now in Pakistan) in 1936. The first meeting of Volleyball Federation of India was held in Ludhiana in 1951. Indian Team till date has won maiden bronze medal in Asian Games for Volleyball in 1986. There is lot that Volleyball Federation of India needs to do to lift this game of Volleyball in the country which is struggling to find their feet as compare to other sports in the current scenario.