Last week, Conor McGregor’s former friend and teammate, Artem Lobov, launched a lawsuit in Irish court against the sports star. The suit demanded five percent of proceeds from McGregor’s $600 million sale of Proper 12 whiskey, claiming Lobov was the man who pushed McGregor into the whiskey business and set up an initial deal with distillers.
Now, McGregor has personally responded to Lobov’s claims in a rather unusual way: through a song he sang on Twitter voice.
“Artem is a rat, na na na na! Hey! Na na, na na! Hey!” McGregor chanted. “Artem is a rat, na na na na! Hey! Rat.”
Lobov originally started talking about his role in the Proper 12 whiskey story in August as part of promotion for an eventual book about his life.
“I told [Conor] about the dominance of Irish whiskey and all of that. He said, ‘you go off and see what deal you can put together’ and I went on my way,” Lobov said in an interview with TalkSport. “I went on and met all different whiskey distilleries. I called some and met some in person. I did my research and put a beautiful deal together. Once the deal was ready, I went to Conor and I said, ‘Conor, I have the deal ready for you. This is going to be a billion-dollar deal, no messing here.’ I’m not sure if he took me seriously or not at the time with the billion dollars.”
“I introduced Audie [Attar] and the rest of the Paradigm [Sports Management] team to my deal and all the people I was already working with and then we got going. We continued working on it and as you can see it was a massive success. I’m really happy to see that and I’m really happy to be a part of it.”
Interestingly enough, Lobov says McGregor offered him $1 million as a thanks for his role in starting the company. “The Russian Hammer” turned it down, although not because he thought the amount was too low.
“Conor offered me $1m but I turned it down, I didn’t accept it,” Lobov said. “You know, throughout my career whenever I have helped Conor with camps, he offered to pay me for them camps, but I never accepted money from him. I said, ‘We’ve always been friends and helped each other. I never paid you for my camps so I’m not gonna accept money from you for my camps either.’”
It’s unclear what changed in the past few months that led Lobov to sue McGregor for up to $30 million. But, what is clear is that Conor McGregor now considers his former close friend a rat.
