Facebook fight over Epizode music festival in Vietnam as competing organisers of event accuse each other of fraud

A battle is brewing over the ownership of one of Vietnam’s biggest annual music festivals, with two rival camps accusing each other of fraud and music fans left questioning the legitimacy of the festival’s 2020 edition, scheduled to take place at the end of this year.

The drama surrounding the Epizode Festival is the latest upheaval to affect the event’s organisers. Epizode was launched on Vietnam’s southern resort island of Phu Quoc in 2016 by a Ukrainian team which previously ran the Kazantip festival on the Crimean Peninsula from 1992 to 2013 until it was forced out by the 2014 Russian annexation of the region.

An attempt to bring Kazantip to the Cambodian island of Koh Pos failed in 2015 when it was banned by local officials out of fear it would involve “indecent activities”.

However, Epizode has been a success story for the organisers on Phu Quoc, with attendance tripling from 5,000 in the opening year to 15,000 at the previous festival, which ran for a marathon 11 days from December 31 to January 10 this year. A-list international artists including Carl Cox, Nina Kraviz and Ricardo Villalobos have appeared at Epizode over the years.

The latest drama began on June 10 when an event titled Epizode: Epilogue – to take place in Phu Quoc from December 29 to January 10 – was launched by a new organisation on Facebook. The next day, the administrators of the original Epizode page on Facebook issued a statement saying a “fake event” had been launched and they had been victims of a “fraud”.

“We were shocked to hear this. The decision to hold the next Epizode festival has not been taken yet due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. We closely monitor the course of events and the festival dates will be announced as soon as we can be confident of the safety of our guests,” the statement said.