Firm in dispute with HSE plans series of boxing events
Of Fight Arab The Helipad Al Mayweather Retired Atop In Floyd Is The Burj Due Dubai Building Boxer To
An Irish festival management company in dispute with the HSE over Chinese ventilators has launched a series of boxing exhibitions, starting with a fight involving Floyd Mayweather atop a Dubai helipad.
Roqu Media International has begun promoting 'Global Titans', a series of boxing and mixed martial arts events.
The series, which bills itself as “the new generation of fight entertainment”, is set to begin with a bout between Mayweather and Don Moore.
Mayweather, 45, retired as a former five-weight world champion in 2018, beating UFC star Conor McGregor to improve his professional record to 50-0.
Moore, also 45, has not fought since 2016, but was unbeaten in his 18 fights.
The fight is due to take place atop the helipad of the Burj al Arab building in Dubai, the world’s only seven-star hotel, on May 14.
Venues for future fights include the pyramids of Egypt this December, Niagara Falls in July 2023, and the Colosseum in Rome in September 2023, according to its website.
Global Titans describes itself as “a subsidiary of Roqu Media International and Yakomoz Events”.
It announced a partnership with Everdome, “a binance smart chain based metaverse project”.
A metaverse is a 3D virtual world, most notably endorsed as a concept in recent times by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook parent Meta.
Roqu chief executive Robert Quirke said that, “with the sports technology market predicted to grow up to $42bn by the end of 2027, we are proud to be an early adopter of this exciting new world called the metaverse”.
He said that having a plot within Everdome, which he described as “the most hyper-realistic metaverse”, will “help take our sports engagement to a new level”.
The metaverse portion of Global Titans is not the series’ only technical idiosyncrasy — its site boasts that all tickets for the Mayweather fight will be non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a unique digital asset stored on the same kind of digital ledger as a cryptocurrency.
Roqu Media has been in dispute with the HSE for two years regarding €10.3m which it was paid to procure ventilators from China in March 2020, at the time of a global shortage of the life-saving machines.
Just 65 ventilators were ever received, according to the HSE, and the devices subsequently failed to pass the quality standards for clinical deployment. They have been in storage in Ireland ever since.
Mr Quirke, a 42-year-old Westmeath native, did not respond to a request for comment regarding the Global Titans series or the ongoing dispute with the HSE.
The HSE, asked whether the dispute has been resolved, said it is “not in a position to comment on this specific matter at the moment”.