A Parliamentary No-No For Viagogo

A properly functioning secondary ticket market benefits fans by providing access to tickets for the events they want to see, and in turn helps purchasers sell on tickets they can no longer use.

As a result, the existence of secondary ticket markets has historically been encouraged. However, the UK market is currently controlled by a small number of resale companies, each benefiting from scarcity increasing a ticket's face value, and often to the detriment of consumers.

Parliament now looks set to take on harmful practices in the secondary sale market, and one notable offender in particular - Viagogo.

Geneva-headquartered Viagogo is now facing a serious backlash from MPs after refusing, for a second time, to attend a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee hearing to give evidence on its business practices.

Viagogo is one of the largest secondary ticket platform operators in the UK market, and, along with its peers, has been under political and legal scrutiny since UK competition watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the practices and legal compliance of ticket re-selling companies in December 2016.

In March 2017, the Culture, Media and Sport select committee summoned Viagogo to provide evidence on ticket abuse. Viagogo failed to appear.

Then in November 2017, the CMA issued enforcement action against the 'big four' secondary ticket sites - Viagogo, StubHub, Get Me In and Seatwave - ordering them to make changes to comply with consumer protection laws, though falling short of reaching a final view on whether such practices were in breach of the law.

All but one of the companies changed their business models as a result - Viagogo being the exception. That failure resulted in the CMA announcing at the end of August that it was taking High Court legal action against Viagogo for a failure to comply with consumer protection laws.

Earlier this month, the parliamentary select committee once again prepared to grill Viagogo on its business practices, though again the company refused, citing "unequivocal legal advice".

That advice was borne from the legal proceedings which the CMA had...