Power Buys Back Benicassim

Maverick festival promoter Vince Power has reportedly bought back Spain’s Benicassim Festival from the administrators winding up his former company, the stock-listed Music Festivals Plc.

Music Festivals’ trading was suspended on the Alternative Investment Market Sept. 21, after the company’s share price plummeted to 2.12 pence and dropped its market capitalization to about £310,000.

 
A year earlier it had floated with a market value around £10 million ($16.2 million).
 
Power’s believed to have bought back the festival through All Music Live Ltd., once more returning the event to private ownership. News of the buyback first came in Irish music and current affairs magazine Hot Press.
 
“I’m delighted that we have entered into an agreement to acquire the shares of Benicassim Ltd that has secured the future of the festival,” Power said in a statement.
 
In February 2010 Vince Power Music Group Ltd., the company he founded after selling Mean Fiddler Music Group to Live Nation and Irish entrepreneur Denis Desmond for £39 million, was also forced to call in the administrators.
 
The 50,000-capacity Benicassim, once Spain’s biggest music festival, is now being challenged for that position by Last Tour International’s BBK Live.
 
Benicassim communications director Ernesto Gonzalez said this year’s festival had an average daily crowd of 40,000.
 
It wasn’t clear at press time what the administrators will do with Music Festivals Plc’s other events, such as the UK’s Hop Farm Music Festival and Costa de Fuego, the Spanish rock festival that this year made its debut on the Benicassim site.