Prisa obliged to pay Mediapro US$57,6 million in damages

The Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced Prisa to pay compensation for damages to Mediapro to the sum of €51 million (US$57,6 million.)

The court order which was made public yesterday, assessing damages to Mediapro for the interim measures Prisa applied for to the Court of First Instance No. 36 in Madrid, and which the Court granted in October 2007, prohibiting Mediapro from exploiting the Audiovisual media rights of football clubs to which it was the rightsholder. The Provincial Court in Madrid revoked these measures in July 2008.

The sentence reconfirms the good name of Mediapro in what became known as “the football war” and the illegality of Prisa’s claims, which, after almost ten years of litigation, have been penalized by the Courts time and time again. The sentence establishes that the interim measures applied by Court 36 allowed Prisa to exploit rights owned by Mediapro, thus depriving Mediapro of exploitation rights and incurring damages amounting to €51 million (US$57,6 million.)

The circumstances surrounding the case date back to August 2007, when Prisa accused Mediapro of breach of contract and arbitrarily cut access to its client’s signal for football matches and subsequent broadcast distribution and international distribution. Prisa claimed that Mediapro were not independently entitled to enter into contracts with football clubs, a claim that Mediapro openly criticized as contrary to competition laws. In January 2015, all five magistrates of the Supreme Court Civil Chamber unanimously ruled in favor of Mediapro.