Lawsuit alleges Sony investigated WPP's media operation and said it ran a 'global crime scheme'

Toni Anne Barson/Getty Images for iHeartMedia A new legal filing says Sony hired investigators to probe WPP's media rebate practices.

Sony's review said that WPP ran a "global crime scheme" and improperly withheld rebates, the filing alleges.

WPP declined to comment on the alleged Sony review and said that the lawsuit referencing it is "baseless." A new filing in a lawsuit from a fired WPP executive alleges that Sony, one of the ad giant's major partners, investigated the company and concluded it had improperly withheld rebates from clients.

The lawsuit says that Sony presented the findings of its investigation to WPP in 2025 in a detailed analysis that said the ad agency giant operated what Sony called a "global crime scheme" across several markets, including China.

The allegations have high stakes for WPP, which handles tens of billions of dollars in ad spending for some of the world's largest companies.

At its core, the lawsuit alleges WPP put its own interests ahead of its clients', engineering a way to use some of their advertising budgets to maximize its own profits without their consent.

The lawsuit says that Sony's investigation alleged this is how the practice worked: WPP's media investment arm, GroupM, would negotiate a rebate deal with a media owner by leveraging its clients' combined advertising spending.

WPP used a network of "intermediary brokers" to hold some of the rebates for itself rather than dispersing them to clients.

WPP used rebate funds to subsidize the cost of ad inventory, then kept the resulting margin as profit that was shielded from audits.

The lawsuit contains a purported slide from Sony's presentation to WPP titled "impact for WPP Advertisers — China 2024," which claims that approximately $110 million was passed back to clients that year, while $350 million remained in its rebate pool "for later utilization" by WPP.

A separate purported Sony slide described the practice as a "fraud scheme" run in China and other markets, and attributed its design to senior global WPP executives.

Sony drew its findings from the work of independent investigators who attended a criminal trial in China involving WPP executives and from interviews with former WPP and GroupM executives, the lawsuit says.

GroupM was rebranded to WPP Media last year.

The lawsuit says Sony supported its findings with "contractual language regarding rebate policies, transaction-level financial reporting, internal emails regarding rebate amounts, and documentation of WPP tracking systems." A Sony spokesperson said the company does not comment on pending litigation.