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OUSA’s Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival will this year be held on 4 October at Forsyth Barr Stadium and is set “to build on the success of last year’s event,” says OUSA General Manager Darel Hall. However, competing with the event is Matthew Black of Brighton Holdings Ltd, who assisted OUSA in contacting breweries and gaining sponsorship for last year’s festival.

Black will be running his own separate event in 2014 after the partnership he believed he had with OUSA came to an end. “The Dunedin Craft Beer Expo” will be held at Dunedin Railway Station on 20 September 2014, two weeks prior to OUSA’s Craft Beer and Food Festival. Falling on the same day as the General Election, Black’s event will also include food, live music and a home-brewing competition.

Black says he helped “extensively” to organise OUSA’s entire event last year. “I invested over $50,000 worth of my time towards the event. I worked on it every day for six months.” Hall says Black was primarily responsible for stall sales, where he used his contacts to bring in brewers to the event, whilst OUSA handled production (layout, electrical, sound etc.), communications, marketing, accounting, legal work and health and safety. OUSA put in 1,934 hours of work from the core events and communications team, excluding any hours put towards accounting, legal work and management of the event. 331 volunteer hours were also used and Hall says it is “mathematically impossible [that] Black put in the same hours as OUSA.”

In August 2013, Black attempted to trademark the name “The Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival”, one month prior to OUSA’s event of the same name. Hall calls this “an ethically curious approach to business.” At the same time, Brighton Holdings Ltd also claimed a half ownership of OUSA’s event “and threatened legal action to that end.”

It can be ascertained from their website that the Craft Beer Expo is using an almost identical business model to that used by OUSA’s Craft Beer and Food Festival last year. Similar promotional wording is also being used, with Hall observing, “It appears that Brighton Holdings Ltd is barely changing the OUSA text from our event.” Photos owned by OUSA have also been used on the Expo’s website “without our agreement.” Black claims that the photos were paid for as part of the event’s budget, “so we both share ownership of the content.”

Black claims that talks between him and the OUSA Communications and Events manager formed a verbal agreement that there would be “a 50/50 liability between OUSA and me.” Hall claims the agreement was referring to the budget, not to ownership, and that “as the only authority to make that call [subject to Executive authority], no agreement was made over ownership.” The issue here is a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the difference between the ownership of assets and operating costs, Hall says. “In terms of assets, the OUSA owns offices and has reserves, for example, that allow an operation to take place. The cost of the operation or activity was shared … [But] without OUSA’s assets there is no way the Festival could have gone ahead.”

“I tried to trademark the event name after OUSA said they were taking full control,” says Black, referring to a meeting with Hall four weeks prior to the 2013 event, where he discovered OUSA would not be wanting future involvement with him. However, Hall denies making any such statement during the meeting. Black claims he was the sole initiator of the event, but Hall insists OUSA had been in talks concerning a beer festival event before Black came along, and that the OUSA events coordinator had even written a paper called “Beertopia” for her degree.

Black says he requested a breakdown of what happened to the 510 tickets OUSA did not charge for, but claims that Hall would not reveal the accounts information. Hall counters that Brighton Holdings “has those numbers anyway because it was a planning document they were a party to,” and, furthermore, they “ended the discussion before this could happen.” The tickets were distributed as part of sponsorships, promotions and media passes, which is standard practice for such an event, and Black received 134 promotional tickets himself. They were therefore not budgeted for and were “irrelevant to the discussion,” Hall says.

OUSA were also aware of his attempt to trademark the event name by this point. Black complained that he was not given any account information after the event either, despite his involvement. “I’m just as much in the dark about whether [the festival] made any money or not.” However, Hall had in fact provided Brighton Holdings with full summary numbers following the event, after having a “two inch thick” paper trail prepared for all expenses. “Once BHL started disputing simple costs … I decided that the attempt by the OUSA to claim the $2,500 or so BHL owed the OUSA wasn’t worth the effort to make it a priority.”

Hall says “there was never going to be money to be made” and that the event made a loss of about $4,000 last year.

In January 2014, Black decided to start organising his own event. He says that despite the “unprofessional” experience he claims to have had with OUSA, “I intend on continuing on with the event in the future.” In an email to the breweries, which was leaked to Critic, Black tells potential stallholders, “You know the space well and set up already” and “last year we had 3500 people attend the event, this year I am hoping for the same.” Implying the event is the same one brewers attended last year, Black says, “I can see why OUSA are annoyed.” He believes they resent the fact Black has built a relationship with the brewers and that he is easily signing them up for his 2014 event. He told Critic “any people I attracted to the event last year should be at my event this year.”

Hall says, “OUSA is challenging BHL for claiming they managed our event. BHL are free to have any event they like, they just need to give a fair representation about their involvement with the OUSA.”