Electric Picnic made €2.4m profit in 2020 despite not going ahead

The company behind the Electric Picnic music festival made a profit of nearly €2.4 million in 2020 despite having no revenues after the event was cancelled due to Covid-19.

EP Republic, which is ultimately owned by a joint venture between Live Nation and concert promoter Denis Desmond, posted the profit following an insurance payout on the cancelled event of more than €3.6 million.

The profit for the year was up 50 per cent on the event’s profits for 2019, the last year that Electric Picnic was staged in Laois, when it generated revenues of close to €17 million.

The 2020 accounts for the company were signed off six weeks ago. They show the business had cash on its balance sheet of almost €7.3 million at the end of 2020. Its retained earnings to that point were close to €7.9 million.

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It employed eight casual staff during the year. Its directors, including music executive Melvin Benn and Zach Desmond, the son of Denis Desmond, were paid by other group companies.

Fontaines DC

Electric Picnic has been staged since 2004 on the Stadbally estate in Laois. It was cancelled due to Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, but its organisers recently announced its return in 2022. The three-day festival will be staged over the first weekend in September with a capacity of 70,000 ticket holders.

This year’s line-up includes bands such as Snow Patrol, Arctic Monkeys and Dublin post-punk outfit Fontaines DC.

Mr Desmond has previously said that Covid cancellations last year cost the MCD concert promotion company that he runs €20 million. EP Republic last year applied for financial backing from a State fund for the live music industry.

LN-Gaiety Holdings, the Live Nation joint venture with Mr Desmond that owns EP Republic, paid £48.3 million (€56.4 million) for Mr Desmond’s MCD Productions, recently filed accounts for the joint venture show.

It also received a total of £30.6 million in 2020 insurance payouts for all of its events across Ireland and Britain, including the Latitude, Leeds and Reading festivals in England.

The total figure would also have included the €3.6 million for Electric Picnic.