Features
Cambridge Has Bumper Year
Having finally accepted it’ll never see the £618,000 (then $906,000) it lost when Cambridge Folk Festival got scammed by its ticketing company a few years ago, the local city council is now hailing the 2013 edition as a “bumper year.”
Photo: Daniel Ackerley
2013's edition.
The council realized the money was gone for good in January, when Mohammed Rashid Qajar and Sally Oakley of Secure Ticket UK – which handled ticketing for the Cambridge festival in 2007 and 2008 – were banned from serving as company directors for 10 years.
Secure Ticket UK had collected the Cambridge box office money and then spent it before going into liquidation.
“This case is especially grave because the damage will have reverberated through a community,” said chief insolvency examiner Mark Bruce.
The council did show some effort in pursuing Secure Ticket UK for money, which was preferable to admitting a publicly funded event had been conned out of such an amount.
The acts helping Cambridge Folk through taxing times July 25-28 included The Levellers, KT Tunstall, The Mavericks, Amadou & Mariam, The Waterboys, Larkin Poe, Bastille, Blonde Ambition, and Steeleye Span.