Part II of the look at why the Fit and Proper Persons test has failed time after time. If this was played out in Hollywood and on the big screen I'm sure we wouldnt bat an eyelid. Sadly this is real life and as fans of the clubs affected the facts deserve to be documented for all to see but at the end of the day will any governing organisation ever be held to account for their failings in being unable to identify those who were actually 'Fit and Proper' to run a football club. Sadly I doubt it. So where have things gone wrong?
Notts County
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH-p0SLL4vw
The Trillion Dollar Con Man of Notts County
In 2009 the oldest club in the
history of the football league Notts County were under the ownership of a
supporters trust. They took the decision to sell out to an investment group
called Qadbak Investments Ltd, a company registered in the British Virgin
Islands, for the sum of just £1 after being promised that millions of pounds
were to be lavished upon the squad.
All started seemingly well enough
when the ex-England manager Sven Goran Eriksson was appointed manager of the
struggling League Two side. He was quickly joined by ex-England International
and former Pompey player Sol Campbell.
The deal had been ratified by the
football league and the football league approved Abid Hyat Khan who passed
their fit and proper persons test. Khan claimed to be a Royal Prince and had
managed to provide the Football League with a guarantee from First London Bank for
the sum of Five Million pounds in the form of a legal affidavit. What the
football league checks failed to show up was the money was being guaranteed by
part of the bank that didn’t exist anymore and Abid Hyat Khan was no more of a
prince than you or I and is wanted by British Police in connection with a one
million pound fraud.
It was claimed by the BBC Panorama
programme that the man actually being the takeover of Notts County was a convicted
fraudster by the name of Russell King. King had been convicted of fraud when he
claimed the insurance on a car he had claimed had been stolen and subsequently
served time for this offence. This conviction would have seen King unable to
pass the fit and proper persons test but with Khan as a front man he was able
to bypass any checks that were undertaken by the football league.
Within months everything has
started to unravel at Notts County with everything having been paid for using
credit. Bills went unpaid and the club was left holding a debt of seven million
pounds in the red and facing administration. The takeover was subsequently
investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.
End Result: Fit and Proper Person
Test 0 Convicted Fraudsters 1
Manchester City
On June 21st 2007 the
former Prime Minister of Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra purchased Premier League
side Manchester City for the sum of £81.6 million. Shinawatra had been ousted
from power in a Military Coup whilst he was abroad. The Thaksin government
faced allegations of corruption, authoritarianism, treason, conflicts of
interest, acting non-diplomatically and muzzling of the press. Thaksin himself
was accused of tax evasion and selling assets of Thai companies to
international investors. Independent bodies such as Amnesty International criticised
Thaksin’s human rights record. Thaksin was also charged for concealing his
wealth during his Premiership. When his assets were frozen by the new
government and charges brought, Thaksin was forced to sell the club and received
a reported £200 million in September 2008 from Abu Dhabi United Group.
Thaksin was
subsequently convicted of the charges brought against him. Despite the allegations and subsequent
conviction of these crimes, he still managed to pass the fit and proper persons
test without any problems.
End Result: Fit and Proper
Persons test 0 Corrupt former Prime Ministers 1
Birmingham City
In 2007 a Hong Kong businessman
by the name of Carson Yeung emerged from near obscurity to buy a 29.9 per cent
stake in Birmingham City. At the time he hoped to raise the necessary funds to
fully takeover the club but failed to do so and the club were subsequently relegated
from the Premier League only to bounce back at the first time of trying from
the Championship.
Mr Yeung is the Chairman and
Executive Director of Grandtop, an investment, entertainment and sportswear
firm that was incorporated into the Cayman Islands. According to company
records, Grandtop at that time hadn’t made any money in the previous four
years. The Telegraph carried out an investigation into Mr Yeung and his
associates and found that some of them have clashed with authorities in the far
east. Birmingham City appointed Peter Pannu, a former Hong Kong police officer
as the clubs new finance chief.
During the 1990s, Mr Pannu had
made headlines several times, most notably when he and his associates were
accused of accepting HK$20,000 (£7,000) from Andely Chan, the Sun Yee On Triad
boss. They pleaded not guilty to the charges. Mr Pannu was acquitted of the
charges in 1996 after Chan was murdered in Macao and another witness told the
court that he no longer wished to testify in the court case. Mr Pannu was also
acquitted of other charges after a judge said any police policy of mixing with
Triads 2to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the underworld” was “fraught with
dangers for all concerned.”
Pollyanna Chu who helped to
finance Grandtop’s bid was fined 12 years previously by Hong Kong’s financial
regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission, for acting a commodities
dealer without a licence. Mr Yeung had arranged to borrow £57 million from Best
China, a company owned by Mrs Chu, 51, who runs a string of casinos in Macao
and is also the majority owner of Kingston Securities, a brokerage in Hong
Kong.
Carson Yeung is currently facing
five charges of money laundering after the Narcotics Bureau Financial
Investigation team of the Hong Kong police arrested him at home and raided his
offices in Tsim Sha Tsui. The amount involved is believed to total nearly £60
million.
End Result: Fit and Proper
Persons test 0 Alleged Money Launderers 1
Glasgow Rangers FC
North of the border, May 6th
2011 saw David Murray sell his controlling interest of 85.3% in the Glasgow
club to venture capitalist Craig Whyte through his company Wavetower Limited for
the sum of just £1. The move saw the Rangers debt to the Lloyds Banking Group
being re-assigned to Wavetower instead. The club were at that time facing a potential
£49 million tax bill with the HMRC.
On February 13th, 2012
Rangers filed legal papers at the Court of Session giving notice of their
intention to appoint administrators. Rangers then officially entered
administration the following day. Just a little over a year since Whyte took control
of the club, he sold his controlling interest to Charles Green for the sum of
£2. Last week the HMRC voted against the proposed CVA which would have seen
them being able to exit administration which ended in the liquidation of the
old company and a new company has been formed The Rangers Football Club.
In 2003 Whyte was a de facto
director of a company called Re-Tex which was wound up. It’s alleged in a BBC
Scotland documentary Rangers: The Inside Story that the company made an offer
to sell shares to potential shareholders at a price based on company statements
the BBC alleges contained ‘false and misleading’ information, formed from
accounts signed off by fake auditors appointed by Whyte. The auditors were
allegedly run by a convicted fraudster Kevin Sykes who was a former associate
of Whyte. Whyte was banned from being a company director when one of his own companies
Vital Holdings Ltd failed to produce satisfactory accounts. Despite Whyte’s
claims to have never being a de facto director in Re-Tex, Rangers confirmed in
a statement to the PLUS Stock Exchange on November 30th 2011 that
Whyte had been banned from acting as a Director.
It was concluded Whyte was not
judged to be a Fit and Proper Person to hold a position at a football club by
the SFA and received a lifetime ban alongside a hefty fine.
End Result: Fit and Proper
Persons test 0 Banned Directors 1
Four
cases with three different governing bodies all of whom had managed to pass
people as being Fit and Proper to run a football club. In the cases of Notts
County, Rangers and Birmingham City it’s the fans who have suffered at the
hands of the ineptitude of the relevant FA’s or league associations in passing
people to be deemed fit and proper. Ironically in the case of Manchester City
who’ve won the FA Cup and English Premier League in the past two seasons, the
departure of major share holder Thaksin was a blessing in disguise.
My own
clubs problems with the Fit and Proper Persons test have been well documented
over the past few seasons. It’s alleged that Sacha Gaydamak acted in the same
manner as what happened in the case at Notts County that he was a front man for
his father Arcadi Gaydamak who was convicted by a French court of organising
arms trafficking in Angola during the civil war in 1993 to 1998 in the amount
of 790 million dollars in a direct violation of the Lusaks Protocol. He was
sentenced in absentia to six years in prison. However his conviction on the
arms dealing was overturned by the Court of appeal in Paris on April 29th
2011.
Whilst it was never proven
despite claims by alleged comments attributed to Arcadi that he was the real
owner of Portsmouth Football Club the fact remains that if true he wouldn’t have
passed a fit and proper persons test and another loophole has been exploited
under the nose of those in authority.
Lighting we are told never
strikes in the same place twice. Well obviously those who make such claims have
never been to Portsmouth or Fratton Park. Step forward owner Ali
Abdullah Al Faraj a man who certain sections allege to claim doesn’t even
exist. Whether or not that remains true or not is pure speculation but the fact
does remain that he never once visited the club or even watched his team having
taken control after the brief ill fated reign of Sulaiman Al Fahim whose tenure
lasted just 40 days. In February 2010 a Dubai court issued an arrest
warrant for Al Fahim related to a dispute over £1.4 million.
Al Faraj often dubbed Al Mirage
by the clubs fans had been brought to the club by Fuglers Solicitor Marc Jacobs
who has been recommended by the so called dubbed super agent Pini Zahavi.
Jacobs was said to allegedly represent several very wealthy high profile Arab
clients. The subsequent problems of the tenure of Al Faraj and Falcondrome have
been well documented and the club subsequently fell into the hands of self
styled reluctant owner Balram Chanrai who at the time of writing is once again
challenging to take over the club once more and lead it out of a second
successive period of administration via a CVA having sold the club into the
hands of CSI headed by one Vladimir Antonov.
It is alleged that during the
period Falcondrome were in charge of Portsmouth that the day to day financial running
of the club was being done by one Daniel Agouzy who was another convicted
fraudster. If as is alleged to be the case that he was handling the financial control
of the club, his conviction would have prevented him from passing a fit and
proper persons test had one ever taken place. Pompey would ultimately become
the first Premiership club to be placed into administration and were docked
nine points which eventually saw them finish bottom of the Premier League and
they were relegated into the Championship. However the lack of control from the
English Premier League was once again surpassed when the club moved into the
control of the CSI group headed up by Vladimir Antonov. Lightning was about to
strike again.
Antonov was a London based
Russian banker who was estimated in 2007 to have a personal wealth of around
$300 million which ranked him number 182 among Russian Millionaires. Antonov
had been linked to attempts to buy south coast neighbours AFC Bournemouth and
Glasgow Rangers yet both deals had failed to materialise to fruition. He had
also tried unsuccessfully to purchase the ailing car firm Saab from GM Ford and
his banking organisation had been denied a licence by Britain’s banking
regulatory body the Financial Services Authority on the grounds that “Snoras
was likely to fail to deal with the FSA in an open and cooperative way.”
Alleged links to money laundering
had proved unfounded but they remained unabated. So here was a guy who GM Ford wouldn’t
do business with, the British FSA wouldn’t give a licence to operate in this
country with yet he was able to pass the so called stringent Fit and Proper
Persons Test to be able to take over control of Portsmouth FC. At no point did
the English FA seek fit to be panicked by the fact that his own father another
Russian banker had been shot in an attempt on his life. So let’s just recap;
one of America’s largest firms wouldn’t do business with Antonov, he was
refused a licence to operate in the UK by the FSA, his Dad had a failed
contract killing on his life and yes the FA weren’t worried about any of this
and he duly passed the Fit and Proper Persons test with consummate ease.
So it should come as no surprise
to learn that in November of last year the parent company CSI went into
administration and subsequently with no offers tabled for Portsmouth FC they
once again went into administration also being docked ten points in the process
and were subsequently relegated again, this time into the League One where they
remain in administration trying to exit via a possible CVA that has been put on
the cards to creditors offering 2 pence in the pound on the debts owed to non
football creditors.
But as always the story doesn’t simply
end there.
November 23rd 2011 it’s
announced that a Europe-wide arrest warrant had been issued for Antonov
following the collapse of his banking organisation Snoras Bank. Lithuanian
prosecutors want to question him as part of an investigation into alleged asset
stripping. On November 24th 2011 Antonov was arrested in London.
This tale of woe and ineptitude
into the complete farce that is the Fit and Proper Persons test North and South
of the border wouldn’t be complete at this juncture without one more twist of
the tail. On March 22nd of this year millionaire Russian banker
German Gorbuntsov was shot and critically injured outside his East London flat
situated near Canary Wharf. Gorbuntsov had recently spoken to the Russian
Police about the attempted assassination of Vladimir’s father back in 2009 and
a result the case had been reopened.
It
seems Antonov Senior and Gorbuntsov are lucky the aim of their marksmen charged
with killing them was as deadly as Dave Kitson’s strike rate during his time
with the south coast club.
Antonov
Jnr awaits his fate. Portsmouth FC awaits their fate also. But the record of
the fit and proper persons test north and south of the border remains
ultimately tarnished yet no one has been held to account for the failings of
three football associations yet the fans are left to suffer.
When
will those in charge be held accountable for their failings towards the clubs
they are charged with looking after in their care and duty to ensure that clubs
are run only by those deemed to be Fit and Proper to do so?
End Result: Fit and Proper
Persons Test 0 Those who’ve tarnished the name of Portsmouth FC and their fine
history… Actually I’ve lost count now sadly
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