Geek Picnic can't pay Richard Dawkins and other participants. Organizers explain this by 'low margins'

On October 17, it became known that the popular science festival Geek Picnic, which is held annually in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was unable to pay the full fee to the superstar scientist Richard Dawkins . Some other festival participants and former employees also reported debts. The organizers themselves admit that there are debts and explain them by the "low margins of the festival business."

Geek Picnic Failed to Pay Full Honorarium to Scientist Richard Dawkins

This was reported on Facebook by British philologist and translator of Russian literature, Oxford University professor Catriona Kelly (the post is currently unavailable; Kelly did not respond to Meduza's messages). According to her, Dawkins told her that the Geek Picnic organizers had not paid him a fee of 25 thousand dollars for his performance and had not even returned the money for tickets to Russia. The conflict with the festival organizers allegedly began because Dawkins violated the terms of his contract by giving a television interview (it was not specified which channel).

The festival's organizer, businessman Nikolai Gorely, confirmed that Geek Picnic has a debt to the scientist. He said that the organizers had fulfilled most of the financial obligations under the contract with Dawkins before the event, including payment for flights, accommodation, and accompaniment. "Right now, my colleagues were closing the contract and were in correspondence with him. After the publication, I personally am in correspondence with Richard. I never even dreamed of not paying Richard Dawkins," Gorely said. Gorely declined to comment further on the situation with Dawkins in a conversation with Meduza, stating that the terms of the contract are confidential information. The Richard Dawkins Foundation did not respond to Meduza's questions at the time of publication.

Geek Picnic is an annual popular science festival dedicated to modern technologies, science and creativity. Geek Picnic was first held in St. Petersburg in 2011, since 2014 it has also been held in Moscow, and since 2017 in Krasnodar. Lectures at the festival are given by entrepreneurs, artists, journalists and famous scientists. In 2016, the host of the Discovery program Jamie Hyneman visited St. Petersburg Geek Picnic, and in 2017, Richard Dawkins did the same. That same year, controversy erupted around the festival due to the participation of Yegor Prosvirnin, the creator of the nationalist website Sputnik and Pogrom.

Geek Picnic has failed to pay several more festival participants

Ivan Chernyavsky, co-owner of the comic book store Chuk i Gik, told Meduza that the store had participated in the Moscow festival every year since 2014 and had no problems with the organizers. In 2017, the festival organizer asked Chuk i Gik for the first time to pay not only for participation in the festival (around 40 thousand rubles), but also to make a deposit of 10 thousand rubles, which the organizers promised to return after the end of the festival. However, Chernyavsky has still not received the money back.

Moreover, in September, one of the Geek Picnic employees contacted Chernyavsky and offered to pay the store a fee for participation in the 2018 festival. Chernyavsky refused, demanding that the deposit be returned. He was told that all the employees responsible for refunding the money had quit, and the company itself had begun to have financial difficulties, so the 10 thousand rubles would be returned to Chuk and Geek only “in the dead of winter.”

Two other festival participants, who asked not to publicize the names of their companies, told Meduza exactly the same story about an unreturned advance.

Geek Picnic organizer Nikolai Gorely confirmed that the festival has debts to some participants, which the company intends to pay off. Gorely declined to name the total amount of the debt, emphasizing that it “does not jeopardize the project’s future.” A former Geek Picnic employee told Meduza on condition of anonymity that the company owes money to “a dozen participants.”

Geek Picnic has other debts, including to its own employees.

A former subordinate of Gorely who worked on the Geek Picnic organization in 2017 told Meduza on condition of anonymity that the company owes debts to several former employees at once. “Everything happens in the company just as Dawkins’ colleague described,” he says. “Agreements are reached, and when the time comes to pay, all efforts are directed toward finding some loopholes to avoid paying.”

He said that Geek Picnic management repeatedly violated the terms of his employment, including unilaterally reducing his salary by 3 times, and when he was fired, they tried to refuse to pay him any money at all. At the moment, they have still not been paid in full.

In a conversation with Meduza, Nikolai Gorely confirmed that the company owes “bonus money” to some former employees, but emphasized that the amount of debt is small.

According to a former Geek Picnic employee who spoke to Meduza, the Geek Picnic organizers owe participants, former employees, and contractors more than 2 million rubles, while the last festival, according to him, brought in more than 10 million rubles. “The amount of revenue from the picnic was astronomical by our standards. How we managed to fall into such a hole is a mystery to me. I think it’s more due to clumsy management. The organization of work in the company is seriously lacking,” said the former employee of the company.

Exponenta (Gorely's company, which organizes Geek Picnic) owes money not only to the people who worked on Geek Picnic, but also to some of the participants in other company events.

Anton Radayev, a representative of the VARENYE ORGANIZM artists' union, which participated in the Smit Space interactive exhibition, told Meduza that Nikolai Gorely's company still owes the artists 145 thousand rubles for work completed in the winter of 2017. Gorely promised to pay the artists this money in 2018 (Meduza has a screenshot of the correspondence).

Nikolay Gorely himself did not name the total amount of the company's debts in a conversation with Meduza, but he admitted that the organizers have some financial problems. "Problems with financing arose due to the low marginality of the festival business and high risks in the projects that were implemented," he said. "Plus, we are an independent project that operates exclusively on self-financing."

Some of Geek Picnic's counterparties have gone to court

According to the unified database of court decisions, since the beginning of 2017, the festival's organizing company, Exponenta, has been a defendant in at least five debt collection cases. The total amount of claims was about one million rubles.

In addition, in June 2017, the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg received a claim from Quadro Electric LLC (which provided electricity for Exponenta's events) for the bankruptcy of Exponenta due to debts. Nikolai Gorely explained to Meduza that the company filed the bankruptcy claim in order to quickly collect the debt for electricity at Exponenta's events. Tatyana Baturina, Public Relations Director for Quadro Electric, explained to Meduza that after the claim was filed, all of Exponenta's debts were repaid, after which Quadro Electric withdrew the claim.

Pavel Merzlikin