VALENCIA, January 20, 2016
The Valencia Open has officially become history. Tournament director Juan Carlos Ferrero and his partners David Ferrer, Conchita Martinez as well as Octagon resigned from all rights and licences of the event. In 2016, the tournament will be held in the Belgian city of Antwerp. The licence was sold for more than two million euros and, according to El Confidencial, the agreement fulfilled the expectations of the tournament’s former owners.
Executive director: David Serrahima
David Serrahima, former chief executive director and CEO of Octagon, the company that managed the Valencia Open, added that they were able sell the licence at a good price, but this does not hide the fact having significant monetary losses due to false promises by the Generalitat Valenciana. “Defaults by the Generalitat put us in clear losses for two years. We have sold the rights to a good price but unpaid debts are also real,” he told Puntodebreak.com.
Juan Carlos Ferrero went on to comment that he felt “cheated” and more than “disappointed”. “We had an agreement with the previous government and another with the current one. The entire people involved in the tournament have worked hard to hold the event in Valencia and they have been deceived by the Generalitat Valenciana. It was not a sponsorship but a trade agreement we had with them. We have done a fantastic job for many years, an extraordinary effort to have a tournament here in Valencia being part of the ATP World Tour. Now we have to go. Not for us, but for the other people I am personally very touched. It was me, who bought the tournament for many years and that it is ending this way is hard for everyone,” said the former world number one during the last edition of the Valencia Open in October.
In 2014, Ferrero signed an agreement with the Generalitat in which €3.5 million were guaranteed with a rate of €1.5 million for three editions of the tournament (2014, 2015 and 2016). There the first breach of contract occured and that was when the tournament began to falter. The entire story does not seem to end here, but what has definitely finished is the career of Juan Carlos Ferrero and his partners as licence holders of the Valencia Open.
