TOP RANK FOUNDER and CEO Bob Arum was the first of professional boxing’s major stakeholders to apparently disown Daniel Kinahan after US, EU and UK law enforcement agencies took unprecedented joint action against the Kinahan Organised Crime Group on Tuesday, US authorities offering a $5 million reward for information that would help to bring Daniel Kinahan to justice.
Sixty years after he began his career as a 31-year-old lawyer in John F. Kennedy’s Justice Department, Arum sits as one of the most successful and respected promoters in the history of professional boxing. But if you ever find yourself in a situation in which Bob Arum appears to be taking a moral stance against you, you’re probably in trouble.
Following the announcement of the sanctions taken against Kinahan and the six other men named by the US Treasury Department as key members in the Kinahan cartel, Arum told USA Today boxing journalist Lance Pugmire: “We won’t have anything to do with Probellum and we’re looking to cut whatever ties we have with MTK.”
Arum was quite pointedly outing these respective promotional and management companies as being key cogs in Kinahan’s boxing machine, spitting in the face of their efforts to deny a direct connection to the Dubliner.
MTK, co-founded by Kinahan, and Probellum, the new promotional company on whose behalf he unabashedly does business, are for all intents and purposes the same entity; ‘MTK Global Promotional Management Ltd’ officially changed its name to ‘Global Promotional Management Ltd’ with the UK’s Companies House in 2020 and, in a wild coincidence, Probellum’s trademarks are owned by Global Promotional Management Ltd. (Also: MTK tried to start an MMA promotion in 2019. It was called Probellum).
Probellum as we witness it today has long been understood to be the next step in the natural progression of Kinahan’s boxing takeover. It is a reinvention of MTK — formerly MGM — whose brand is terminally poisoned. But Probellum is a far larger, far more ambitious operation than its backseated ancestor.
Whereas MTK’s role was to manage its fighters and work in conjunction with their promoters, Probellum is itself a promotional company which has been hoovering up highly rated boxing talent from all over the world at an unprecedented rate. Having already secured a broadcast deal with US media giant Discovery (which sees Probellum fights shown live on the Discovery-owned Eurosport in Ireland and the UK), it has become a direct competitor to Arum’s Top Rank, Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom, Frank Warren’s Queensberry and Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy within just six months of its existence.
Boxing events are, as a general rule, extremely expensive to stage. Their commercial success is predicated largely on gate receipts. On Friday 18 March and Saturday 19 March, Probellum staged consecutive shows in Dubai — where Daniel Kinahan has lived since 2016 — with 10 fights taking place on each: that’s 40 fight purses, a handful of them worth six figures — including those dished out for the Saturday-night headliner between England’s Sunny Edwards and Pakistan’s Muhammad Waseem, two men in whose careers Kinahan is intimately involved as a manager/advisor.
There were no official attendance figures provided for either Probellum show in Dubai but at a rough count off the TV, the combined turnout was roughly 12.
This is a luxury that their promotional rivals literally cannot afford.
It’s only natural that, after several years during which MTK and Arum’s Top Rank formally joined forces to steer the careers of some of the world’s best boxers (including World heavweight champion Tyson Fury), at least one of Kinahan’s most barefied allies would have suddenly found himself looking over his shoulder.
“We are not going to deal with Daniel,” Arum told Mailsport’s Riath Al-Samarrai on Tuesday. “We will respect the sanctions. We will deal directly with Tyson [Fury] or his lawyer…
I wasn’t pleased with a number of things he (Kinahan) was doing in boxing. I was looking to sever ties anyway.
This is actually the second time that Arum has claimed he will no longer deal with Kinahan. He previously stated as much in 2020 during the maelstrom which followed Top Rank heavyweight Tyson Fury’s clearly orchestrated shout-out for his advisor in an Instagram post which kicked off Kinahan’s two-year PR campaign in earnest.
One of the quotes which has for years preceded Arum — “Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth” was, in fairness, just a throwaway joke among friends which has since taken on a life of its own.
But while it is now literally illegal to work with Kinahan in America, it would be naive to believe that a man who has kept most of his life’s business off the books will be privately ostracised by boxing’s major promoters who have, to varying degrees, depended on his input for several years. Kinahan has used his snowballing influence to weave himself into the very fabric of the sport, so much so that if he was to be removed, the entire industry could unspool.
There are few corners of pro boxing left untouched: just two weeks ago, Mauricio Sulaiman, president of the Mexico-based World Boxing Council (which is seen by those outside of boxing as one of the sport’s four major ‘governing bodies’ but in practicality is little more than a profiteering private company like its counterparts) wrote of his “full support” for Kinahan’s involvement in the sport whose sanctity he claims to protect.
Sulaiman, just like his counterparts at the WBA, WBO and IBF see Kinahan and Probellum not as a threat, but as an extra avenue through which they can top up their respective coffers through sanctioning fees for title fights, which is their raison d’être.
Kinahan also now counts upon a cohort of influential disciples in the British and American combat-sports media, who exist even outside of the MTK Global-sponsored IFL TV YouTube channel which has for so long moonlit as his personal public relations arm. At this year’s Boxing Writers Association of America dinner, one alleged journalist proposed him as a nominee for 2021 Manager of the Year.
It’s unlikely that these media figures will have the minerals to continue to spin on Kinahan’s behalf. Anyone who goes to bat for him now, particularly in America, may face bigger problems than issues of journalistic credibility.
As always, though, the real media power rests with the broadcasting giants who beam Kinahan-associated fighters into people’s living rooms around the world. Just a month into their TV deal with Probellum, Discovery in America may well feel that boxing is merely a hassle that they could do without. Alternatively, that Kinahan tends to keep his name off the paperwork may offer them sufficient plausible deniability to brazen it out; that degree of separation has always allowed their UK counterparts to proclaim their hands clean on a technicality.
