APAC Promotion Makes Statement Denying Mercedes Mone's Claims After Title Was Vacated

Mercedes Mone is finally without gold. Over the last several months, Mone has continued to drop all of her championships from promotions around the world, thus ending her “Ultimo Mone” reign across the professional wrestling scene. The final title dropped was APAC’s Malaysia Championship, which was vacated by the AEW star. The promotion has now responded to this decision and cleared up any controversies regarding the situation. 

Mone initially revealed the title was being vacated on her Mone Mag page, stating that the promotion could not fly her out nor were they willing to work with other promotions. 

“While I was in London, I had to make a tough call. I sent the Malaysia Championship back. My team and I really tried to make things work. We put in the effort, had the conversations, and explored every option. But at the end of the day, they told us they didn’t have the budget to fly me out and weren’t open to working with other promotions. That just didn’t align with the vision. So I made the decision to vacate the title.”

The founder of APAC Wrestling (@TheShaukat on X) responded to these claims, denying much of what was said by Mone. 

“Woke up to a flood of tags, so here’s the truth. We tried. We reached out to other promotions. We did NOT ask anyone to fly our talent in — I have receipts. I even tried to make Malaysia work. End result: Nor Phoenix Diana didn’t get closure. Just truth.”

A much larger statement was posted which revealed his huge respect for Mone, but stated that the narrative was untrue and they did in fact try to find avenues to work with other promotions, listing several, but nothing worked out. It was also noted that the promotion’s founder was willing to do extra work to secure sponsors in order to fly over Mone, and did not ask any other promotions to do it for him, but ultimately their budget is not that of other companies. The former champion revealed recently that she'd be returning to AEW soon.