Defunct management company MTK Global, the company founded by alleged Irish crime boss Daniel Kinahan, was using the bank accounts of their signed fighters to funnel vast sums of money of up to $1 million, it was claimed in a court hearing.
Earlier this week, The Sunday World, an Irish outlet that has closely tracked the developments of the Kinahan Organized Crime Group, revealed elements of a recently unredacted court transcript from Aug. 25 concerning boxing manager Moses Heredia, who is suing Kinahan and MTK for poaching his fighter, the lightweight contender JoJo Diaz.
Diaz, a 2012 Olympian from Los Angeles who fights under Golden Boy Promotions, signed with MTK in late 2020, prompting Heredia to launch his lawsuit. MTK had prodigious reach in boxing, with several elite fighters in its stable, including WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.
MTK shut its door in 2022 after the US government imposed a sanction on Kinahan and several of his colleagues, as well as putting up a $5 million bounty on his head.
The court transcript revealed that Heredia’s legal team had traveled extensively in the Middle East and Ireland to acquire “documentary evidence” of the tactics that MTK used to sign fighters. Kinahan is believed to have resided in Dubai since 2016.
“In the discovery in the litigation, it reveals that MTK would enter into zero percent agreements with the fighters, and then push in half a million to a million dollars’ worth of euros in increments, and then you would see that money leave the fighter’s bank account in also large sums,” said Eric Montalvo, an attorney for Heredia.
“So, it appears this is a mechanism upon which they were moving their money. So, I was pretty happy on that development.”
In addition to Fury, MTK once backed the likes of Billy Joe Saunders, Josh Taylor, Carl Frampton, and Sunny Edwards.
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.