The previous chief government of WPP’s Movement Content material Group — the producer behind “Love Is Blind” and different actuality TV exhibits — is suing the advert company, saying he was fired after he flagged alleged improper billing practices.
Within the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court docket for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, Richard Foster stated he was ousted after he repeatedly warned senior managers about alleged “kickback practices” involving the corporate’s “rebate-driven offers” that he stated “have been unsustainable, illegal, and a big risk to the Firm.”
Foster, a 17-year veteran, led WPP’s media division that’s the producer and co-financier of “Love Island” and a few 2,500 different tv exhibits world wide. The division was rebranded in 2023 as GroupM Movement Leisure in North America.
Foster alleged in his lawsuit that GroupM leveraged “consumer budgets to safe stock offers” from media corporations that included money rebates, stock reductions and different monetary incentives, and that these transactions weren’t at all times clear or disclosed to shoppers.
Over the past 5 years, the lawsuit states, the corporate “generated rebate-driven offers valued between $3 [billion] and $4 billion, of which it improperly retained roughly $1.5 [billion] to $2 billion.”
However somewhat than confront the problems, Foster claims executives “marginalized him, and in the end terminated him and his crew to cowl up their very own improper practices.”
WPP disputed the claims.
“The Firm is conscious of a lawsuit within the New York State Court docket filed by a former worker who was let go in a current organizational restructuring,” a WPP spokesperson stated in an announcement. “The court docket has not but made any findings in relation to the allegations and we are going to defend them vigorously.”
In December, Foster submitted a 35-page inside report emphasizing that there have been alternatives to determine a brand new leisure division, however warned that its use of rebates may pose “doable authorized and reputational” dangers to the corporate.
At one level, Foster alleged that he advised one government that “WPP and GroupM have ‘been sleepwalking to the sting of a cliff and other people don’t wish to hear it.’”
In January, Foster stated he was requested to debate the report with Brian Lesser, world CEO of GroupM, who “expressed concern in regards to the authorized dangers tied to GroupM Buying and selling and stated he would examine this additional.” Days later Foster claimed that he acquired a textual content from Lesser asking him to ship a “sanitized model of the report” and “to exclude any overt criticism of [GroupM Trading] as that isn’t within the spirit of working collectively.”
Finally, Foster stated he was terminated on July 10. He’s looking for $100 million in damages.
“Richard Foster devoted almost 20 years to serving to construct one of many world’s most profitable media and leisure creation operations,” his lawyer, William A. Brewer III, companion at Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors, stated in an announcement. “When he stood up for transparency and accountability at WPP, he was let go. This case will shine a lightweight on systemic misconduct and the retaliation confronted by an government who refused to go alongside to get alongside.”
