West Virginia Sports Betting Fallout Leads To Lawsuit Filing

• December 2018 was the launch for online sports betting in WV.
• March 2019 saw the platform shutoff for unknown reasons.
• April 2019 sees a lawsuit filed from Delaware North.

Filed on Thursday of last week, a lawsuit appeared in Delaware’s Court of Chancery between Delaware North and Miomni Gaming.

What looked like a partnership gone wrong and disbanded has turned into an attempt for Delaware North to collect damages from fraud and breach of contract.

The owner of the Wheeling Island Casino and Mardi Gras Casino used Miomni Gaming as their sportsbook supplier, after finalizing a long-term partnership in 2018. However, it discovered that Miomni Gaming did not have ownership of the BetLucky app, as they had claimed.

It snowballed further when Entergaming,  the company that does own the majority of BetLucky, expressed their disdain with Miomni using the product.

Miomni continued to offer the platform to Delaware North for an additional month, without any notification towards the casino owner.

The books have been offline since March 6 in both the retail and online format. Both Mardi Gras and Wheeling Island casinos were the only mobile sportsbooks in West Virginia.

Now, Delaware North is looking for monetary damages and other relief, including the membership interest in BetLucky from Miomni – which was set in the partnership agreement.

The hospitality company named not only Miomni as the defendant, but CEO Michael Venner as well for his “ongoing pattern of misrepresentation and bad faith.”

Reasons for the lawsuit cited by Delaware North include:

• False claims during contract negotiations and in the (joint-venture) agreement that Miomni owned all rights to the platform.
• Failure to disclose in a July 2018 professional services agreement and later in the BetLucky license that Entergaming owned and controlled the “back-end” of the platform and continued to provide services for it.
• Intentionally concealing from DNG, from DNG’s affiliates, and from BetLucky the existence of its contract dispute with Entergaming.
• Intentionally concealing from DNG, from DNG’s affiliates and from BetLucky Entergaming’s Feb. 25 letter and Entergaming’s termination of services under their agreement.
• Intentionally concealing from DNG, from DNG’s affiliates, and from BetLucky the true cause of the platform’s outages.

Delaware North is continuing to evaluate all of its options and has no timetable for when sports wagering will be active at the two casinos. It is expected that the solution and implementation will take several months or longer.

News tags: Delaware | Delaware North | Miomni Gaming | West Virginia sports betting