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Former ROH and current Impact champion Austin Aries made a surprise appearance on ROH's 16th Anniversary PPV tonight, sparking speculation that the two companies are now working together.
To respond to all the emails we received, the companies are not working together, at all. If they were, certainly ROH would have identified him as Impact champion, which they did not.
Austin Aries is not under a signed contract with Impact. Contractually, they couldn't prevent him from appearing, as he's not signed to any paperwork that would prevent him from appearing elsewhere.
Aries was booked, we are told, like any other independent talent is by ROH - directly and wouldn't need to clear the appearance with Impact.
As far as the idea promotions working together, it was just a year ago that ROH had a PPV event pulled from DirecTV because Impact Wrestling made the decision to send cease and desist letters to a number of PPV companies because ROH was going to utilize The Hardy Boys, with Impact claiming ownership over the characters and trademarks. While Matt Hardy may have eventually gained control of the characters and trademarks, ROH was still burnt that night, and they aren't likely to offer an olive branch to Impact when they were the ones wronged in that scenario.
So, Impact Wrestling was not involved in the least and may not have even known Aries was going to be appearing tonight.
Tonight was Aries' first appearance for Ring of Honor since 2015. He noted in his promo that he'd held every championship in ROH except the TV belt. If one doesn't include the Six Man Tag Team championships, which were introduced after Aries departed the company, Aries would be correct as he was the first two-time ROH champion and had a run with the ROH Tag Team championships while partnered with Roderick Strong.
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