Former boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. is suing Showtime Networks and the former president of Showtime Sports, alleging the company helped facilitate an extended fraud scheme that denied him roughly $340 million in earnings
Mayweather filed the lawsuit Tuesday in California state court, seeking repayment for the alleged misappropriated funds plus millions of dollars in damages for missed investment opportunities that money could have gone toward.
The lawsuit focuses on the business practices of Al Haymon, Mayweather’s former agent and financial advisor.
It alleges that Showtime and former top executive Stephen Espinoza, who brought Mayweather to the network and negotiated terms for many of his early fights, ignored red flags indicating Haymon was siphoning millions from the boxing star.
Haymon is not named in the suit, which paints him as a highly secretive person who intentionally avoids leaving paper trails by dealing almost entirely via faxes and in-person meetings. It lays out a timeline of his relationship with Mayweather, who the suit said viewed Haymon as a father figure and confidant.
Rather than taking the 33 percent cut of fight payoffs that boxing managers typically accept, the suit said Haymon made a verbal agreement with Mayweather in 2004 to receive 10 percent of his earnings. That arrangement extended for more than 15 years despite the lack of a written agreement between the two.
During that time, Haymon allegedly set up a series of bank accounts under his name and those of people working with him without disclosing the details to Mayweather.
Haymon then began working with Espinoza to serve as a sort of financial middleman on the boxer’s behalf, the suit alleges. Instead of going to Mayweather directly, his earnings were deposited into Haymon’s network of bank accounts, which he maintained with an associate named Jeff Morris. Those accounts would then transfer the money to Mayweather after deducting Haymon’s cut.
“Given the size of the transfers (hundreds of millions) and the unusual nature of paying a fighter via a third-party lawyer’s trust account, this should have raised red flags within Showtime,” the lawsuit states. “On information and belief, Stephen Espinoza and other Showtime executives were aware that Al Haymon was the de facto controller behind those accounts. …
“Thus, Defendants knew that by sending funds to Jeff Morris’s account, they were knowingly participating in a structure that kept Mayweather from directly receiving or overseeing his own earnings.”
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