[div class=”notice” class2=”icon”]The following is from an article on LiverKick.com, part of the MiddleEasy Network.[/div]
The K-1 World Grand Prix Final 16 is just over two weeks away now and there has been no card announced and from reports inside of fight camps from managers and fighters, there are no finalized contracts for the fights. It’s Showtime’s Simon Rutz made a deadline for K-1 to pay up, which was last Friday, when this came and went the deadline was apparently extended to Wednesday of this week. We’ve been in contact with Simon Rutz and other employees of It’s Showtime who could confirm that were some financial problems and disagreements and were still waiting for their payments before they could move forward. There has been no word over the past two days from the It’s Showtime camp, though. LiverKick.com reached out to some K-1 officials who had no further details for us other than thanking us for our patience and telling us just to wait a little bit longer and there should be an update.
Now there are reports coming out of the Netherlands that K-1 has been offering a “deal” that reads a lot like a settlement to fighters who would like to participate in the K-1 World Grand Prix Final 16. The deal is for fighters to sign a contract by tomorrow, and that the contract waives a certain degree of K-1 and FEG’s liability to fighters for past financial obligations. Signing this contract being offered by FEG assures the fighters a spot in the Final 16, but waives the fighter’s right to half of the money that FEG owes the fighters, which in some cases will be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only if those contracts are signed with FEG pay fighters any of the money that they owe, which begs the question of what happens to fighters like Ray Sefo and Alistair Overeem who are not looking to participate in the World Grand Prix this year but are owed a lot of money?
