The murky characters that have blighted the name of Portsmouth FC part III

What’s the story in Balamory wouldn’t you like to know? Miss Hoolie would have locked herself in the school cupboard by now at the names that have already been mentioned. Two men banned from holding Directorships for seven years; two counts of being on the brink of bankruptcy and another one not far off; two men on trial for tax evasion, one wanted arms dealer and a son who spends the banks money faster than an F1 car in full flight who stands accused of asset stripping. If this does get turned into a TV documentary series one day I won’t be watching because it was painful enough watching the scenes unfold in public as it was but being Pompey we couldn’t let things lie there. As always as one man leaves there’s a magnetic draw pulling in another.

Sulaiman Al-Fahim

In March 2009, Al-Fahim was listed fourth in Arabian business magazine's list of "The World's most influential Arabs. In September 2008 as part of the Abu Dhabi United Group of which he was a board member he was present as they completed the purchase of Manchester City. In the Arab world he was known for being the presenter on their version of The Apprentice. Piers Morgan has done a TV interview with the man in which he bragged about his personal wealth and was pictured driving open top sports cars and flying on private business jets. So when he arrived saying he wanted to take over Portsmouth FC it seemed at first we’d somehow managed to avoid a possible financial meltdown and that the good times would continue to roll.

In May 2009 it was reported that Al-Fahim had agreed a deal with owner Sacha Gaydamak to buy the club in a deal worth £60 million once the process of due diligence had taken place and he’d passed the Fit and Proper persons Test. Three months passed with fans starting to wonder what on earth was going on. News was circulating that CEO Peter Storrie had come up with his own consortium and was trying to purchase the club. Final at the end of August 2009 Al-Fahim or the twat in the hand as many dubbed him finally took over as owner of the club.

At the start of October it was reported that the wages of the first team players hadn’t been pained. The warning lights started to flash around the footballing world. A day later it was reported that Al-Fahim was in hospital in Dubai. By the 5^th of October after just 40 days in charge of the club, Al-Fahim sold 90% of his shares to Ali al-Faraj. Al-Fahim claimed that he has sold the shares for £70 million and had managed to retain all of the club’s real estate assets although it was soon alleged that he hadn’t received a penny. In February 2010 a Dubai court issued a warrant to arrest Al-Fahim over a dispute of over just £1.4 million.

Pompey fans worldwide were all asking what the hell was going on. In just 40 days we’d managed to have three owners. What had just happened? Did this new man have any money? Were the players going to get paid? Just how much financial trouble were we in?

Peter Storrie

One man that knew the answer to those questions better than any other was the CEO Peter Storrie, the man who helped steady the rudder as he anchored the ship onto the rocky shores and watched as it began to sink pointing the finger of blame at everyone whilst proclaiming he was the messiah and was doing everything he could to help save the club. To believe him you’d have thought that he only slept ten minutes a day and that the future was in his hands. As panic set around Fratton Park for a time the fans believed what he was saying to. Everyone was taken in. The man who it transpires managed to get a win / draw bonus put into his contract despite being a fat overpaid lard arse and not kicking a bin in anger let alone a ball on the pitch, had at the start of the troubles the backing of the fans and his name was sung at Fratton Park. By the end of his departure fans weren’t singing his name far from it.

Storrie was the man who managed to draw up some of the very worst footballing contracts in the history of English football but it seems he was very good at negotiating his own fairy tale contracts for himself in much the same manner as Manager Harry Redknapp had down when negotiating to receive a percentage of player sales for those players sold in profit. Somehow Storrie has managed to snag himself a bonus of £3,000 every time the club won and £1,500 for every time they drew. Impressive work if you can get it when you consider he was CEO. Storrie was the CEO who wrote into all the players contracts the win bonus for the FA Cup which ended up costing us a fortune. He said they were put in because he never expected the club to win the FA Cup. I wonder what they had written in if we were to win the league? Why would you spend millions on transfers and wages in the hope of not winning anything? It wasn’t just the players who’d been promised ridiculous bonuses to. The clubs whose players we’d purchased were also promised additional revenues if the players they’d sold achieved certain levels of success such as winning the FA Cup. ‘You want another £500,000 if we win the FA Cup? Sure why not. Just sign here.’

Because of Storrie’s naivety the FA Cup win was estimated to have cost the club an additional £3 to £4 million pounds with Chelsea and Rennes understood to have benefited to the tune of £1 million between them both.

Storrie at the height of the financial mess he’d played his part in was being paid £600,000 a year which made him the highest paid CEO in English football. He had received substantial bonuses during his time with the club including £750,000 when we won the FA Cup and £500,000 for the money he had brought into the club during January 2009 when the financial chaos had really started to kick in. Ever the hero though he didn’t take the bonus until the August of 2009.

When Sacha stopped putting money into the club Pompey owed the banks £44 million and the wage bill stood at around the £4.5 million mark every month. Players were quickly moved on trying to generate revenue but sell on clauses meant that the club wasn’t receiving all the transfer fees. Arsenal for example were owed £4.5 million from the sale of Diarra to Real Madrid and Chelsea the same from the sale of Johnson to Liverpool.

Under the FA’s football Agents regulation G15 clubs must publish how much they spent on agent’s fees. From October 1^st 2008 to September 30^th 2009 Pompey paid out £3,184,725 to agents.

Someone asked me the other day if we sold so much talent for so much money where did it all go? Well when you start to add it all up; £44 million to the banks, £3.1 million to agents, £9 million to Arsenal and Chelsea for Diarra and Johnson, an estimated annual wage of £54 million. Bonuses such as £750,000 being paid to Storrie for winning the FA Cup, £500,000 for overseeing the sale of players to pay off the banks and a manager whose salary was £4.2 million a year. You’ve got 18 players and 1 CEO on win bonuses of £3,000 and £1,500 for every draw. This isn’t mentioning the money we weren’t paying the Inland Revenue or the transfer fee’s we’d paid for the players in the first place.

Storrie claims that he was the innocent party and that he tried to warn people what was happening at the club. He certainly was well paid for the mess he made. Like Milan Mandaric and Harry Redknapp he has been charged with tax evasion by the HRMC in relation to a payment made to agent Willie McKay.

Ali Al-Faraj

Al-Faraj or Al-Mirage as he was subsequently nicknamed by the loyal Pompey following took over the club from the hands of Al-Fahim. The £5 million that Al-Fahim had put into the club hadn’t stretched far. It transpires that Al-Fahim wasn’t the principle investor in Portsmouth. A consortium has promised an injection or around £50 million into the club. When the accountants saw what a mess the club was in they understandably ran as fast as they could. This had left Al-Fahim holding the baby with his pants around his ankles for all the Arab world to see.

So enter Al-Faraj the supposed billionaire Arab that no one in the Arab business world knew anything about. Storrie releasing that all wasn’t well as Al-Fahim struggled to raise the finance to fund the club contacted the agent Pini Zahavi who had helped broker the deal which took Roman Abramovich to Chelsea in had pocketed £5 million in the process. He had suggested approaching Mark Jacob a property lawyer with some interesting contacts in the property world.

By this time Redknapp had scurried off to Tottenham and results on the pitch were getting worse and the players weren’t getting paid so the news of a property investor who also held a stake in Chemical firm Sabic must have been music to the ears of those still at Pompey.

A deal was struck with Al-Fahim where he was promised that he would be repaid his £5 million at a later stage at that he could keep 10% of the shares as equity and collateral. Allegedly he considered this a very good deal at the time. Good old Sir David Richards over at the Premier League rubber stamped the Fit and Proper Persons test and Al-Mirage was now in charge.

Any proper checks carried out would have shown that Al-Mirage wasn’t a share holder in Sabic as it’s owned by the Saudi Arabian government. Once more the Fit and Proper Persons test had failed and moreover it had failed Pompey.

 
With the outstanding wages finally paid off £1.8 million Al-Mirage never did show his face at Fratton Park. Certain other characters did however show their faces.

The murky characters that have blighted the name of Portsmouth FC part II

Show me any over football club who’ve managed to attract too many shady characters to their doors with such seemingly such effortless ease. In Part I we saw the names of Venables and Ashby who both were banned from holding Directorships in any business for a total of seven years and the latter was even jailed. The families of the Deacons and the Gregory’s who both managed to take Pompey to the brink of bankruptcy and Milan Mandaric who despite delivering the good times back to the club, stands trial as I type accused of tax evasion with old boss Harry Redknapp. If they weren’t bad enough, the list of names continues and gets steadily worse. Only at Pompey!

Harry Redknapp

Harry’s time at Pompey brought us a multitude of memories, from FA Cup wins and promotion to the English Premier League to his departure to neighbours Southampton where to his credit he did manage to get them relegated before returning to manage us for a second time. Harry was even given the freedom of Portsmouth after his FA Cup win though I suspect he probably chooses not to come within five yards of stepping foot in the city unless he has lost all leave of his senses which with Harry is always a genuine possibility. Interestingly Mandaric also had been given the same freedom and the pair remain 2 of only 32 people to have been given the honour. Other more illustrious names include Field Marshall Montgomery and Sir Winston Churchill.

In the past week or so we’ve learnt that Harry writes like a two year old or so he claims, so the fact he managed to find out so much information on players and bring a total of 88 into the club during his time is quite a mean feet and shouldn’t be under estimated. Our ex owner Milan Mandaric stated how Harry could act like a child when he wanted to buy a player. All these it seems great characteristics for paying a manager £4.2 million a year. I know I nearly fell of my chair when I read that part too.

Redknapp originally came to Pompey as Director of Football before taking over as Manager and guiding the club to promotion winning The Championship in the process. During his time as Director of football he had managed to negotiate into his contract that he would be paid 10% of any transfer fees received for any players sold in profit, this figure then dropped to 5% when he became manager. Little wonder Harry has a reputation for being a wheeler dealer at the club’s he has managed in his time. As manager of West Ham he was paid a fee of £300,000 when the club sold defender Rio Ferdinand to Leeds United for a then record British transfer fee of £18 million. It was this payment which triggered the investigation by the HMRC into Harry’s business affairs and the accusations now levelled at him that both he and Mandaric allegedly evaded paying tax on the monies paid to him into the Monaco account he set up in the name of his dog. Perhaps he wasn’t sure how to spell Harry Redknapp. Was it one p at the end or two? I know lets use the dog’s name it’s shorter and easier to remember.

Like Mandaric, Harry will lean his fate next Tuesday when the jury decides the fate of both men. Whatever the jury decide Harry successfully pocketed money from the club and did so legitimately and with no moral qualms in taking money that could have been reinvested into the club. Mandaric saw no problem or issue with it either.  Money it seems was no object at the height of success with the club. Only when Harry went scurrying like a sewer rat to Tottenham Hotspurs did we start to really work out what a mess he’d help to cause. Paying players like ex England international Sol Campbell a reported £100,000 a week was always going to end in tears let’s be honest.

Alexandre Gaydamak

In January 2006 the man more affectionately known as Sacha walked into the club to become
co-owner with Milan Mandaric. In July 2006 he became the sole owner of the club and Mandaric took on a position of Non-Executive Chairman which he held until he left the club. Sacha is son to Arcadi Gaydamak a man who in 2000 had a warrant issued for his arrest by Paris Magistrates wanting him for questioning over an alleged arms-for-oil deal with Angola in the early 1990s. Premier League officials were quick to point out that Sacha’s takeover would be subject to him passing the Fit and Proper Persons Test. Well that’s a relief then. Like the word bankruptcy this won’t be the last time in the tale that those words will crop up in the story.

With the test passed and no problems arising from being the son of a wanted arms dealer everything was looking on the up for Pompey.

The 2006-2007 season saw the arrival of so many big names it was hard to believe that any of it was real. The following arrived on free transfers but with big contracts; Sol Campbell, Nwankwo Kanu, Sylvain Distin and Hermann Hreidarsson. In the mid 1980’s Paul Mariner was rumoured to be the best paid player in the country when he was at Pompey being paid £2,000 per week. Here we were twenty years later reportedly paying Campbell £100,000 per week, fifty times more! But the player acquisition hadn’t stopped there; those were just the free transfers;

Lauren £500,000

Andy Cole £500,000

Djimi Traore £1 million

David James £1.2 million

Niko Kranjcar £3.5 million

Sulley Muntari £7 million

Seven million pounds on a single player! Who couldn’t help but not dream that the club had won the lottery around this time? In total 14 new faces were brought in for combined fee’s of around £13.7 million. Money it seemed was no object, no fee to high and no wage to large. Pompey were spending big and really making waves in the footballing world.

The 2007 – 2008 season saw the spending continue with real aplomb;

Glen Johnson £4 million

Lassana Diarra £5.5 million

David Nugent £6 million

John Utaka £7 million

Jermaine Defoe £7.5 million

In total eight players were recruited on combined fee’s of £30 million.

Into 2008 – 2009 and we were still at it;

Hayden Mullins £2 million

Angelos Basinas £3.5 million

Nadir Belhadj £4.4 million

Younes Kaboul £5 million

Peter Crouch £10 million

Now I’ve followed the club since 1986 and my father has done since the 1950s and I am sure we are not alone in saying that the notion of Pompey ever spending ten million on one player would have been utterly ridiculous. The thing is sat here in early twenty twelve it’s still as barmy looking back at how much was better spent and the wages involved. This season was interesting for who left the club though. Sure seven players had come in for £24.9 million combined, but Muntari, Mendes, Diarra and Defoe were sold for combined fees of £47.2 million.

Just to show you how far the club had come in a decade, in the 1998-1999 season we had brought seven players in for a combined total of £630,000 and the highest fee paid was a quarter of a million for Steve Claridge. Ten years later the highest fee paid was 40 times that amount.  Diarra was sold for £16.5 million! Our entire playing squad isn’t worth that now. It was shear madness to think that it could all be sustained.

Everyone now knows it couldn’t be sustained. The problem is when it’s happening and your watching Sol Campbell walk up the new Wembley steps and holding the FA Cup aloft in triumph you’re not really sat giving any thought to I wonder who’s paying for all this.

In 2006 Pompey made a loss of £912, 397 for the year which wasn’t the worst set of results for a club like Pompey. However 2007 saw a loss of £23.4 million, in 2008 £16.9 million and in 2009 £14.47 million to bring a combined total of £55.7 million. For clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City bank rolled by the personal wealth of billionaires, figures like these wouldn’t be blinked at. When the money is being funded from bank loans and the numbers land on a bank managers desk you can imagine the stench being omitted from the orifices of the Managers at Barclays and Standard Chartered Bank. They wanted their money back unsurprisingly. The salary level was 109% of the income which was the same as at Manchester City.

The club once again was again in financial meltdown only this time we’d taken the bar to an even greater height. This wasn’t £25,000 that Pompey had to find. Sacha had managed to turn the scene of chaos into one from Ben Hur; the banks were baying for blood.

CEO Peter Storrie was charged with finding a new owner for the club and fast and the stories that follow just get worse and all the more unbelievable. Gaydamak stands allegedly accused of asset stripping the club for good measure. Remarkably Sacha is still owed money by the club.

Arcadi Gaydamak

When the club was once more put up for sale by Sacha, reports starting circulating in September 2008 that Arcadi Gaydamak was laying claim to being the real owner of Portsmouth. The Jerusalem-based Russian-Israeli businessman listed all his assets to Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, including Portsmouth which he valued at £300million. He made the claims to counter any accusation that financial difficulties were threatening his £1 billion personal fortune.

In March 2010 CEO Peter Storrie gave an interview with Daily Telegraph journalist Henry Winter suggesting Sacha had run into problems because as he put it “Everything got frozen in Israel.”

Much has already been written about Arcadi Gaydamak over the years and as I previously mentioned at that time he had a warrant out for his arrest. One thing I can suggest is that even the English Premier League’s Fit or Proper person’s test would have seen that Arcadi Gaydamak wouldn’t have been deemed fit and proper to run a football club. But then again Thaksin Shinawatra was allowed to gain control of Manchester City so perhaps I could be wrong. Surely lessons would be learnt and the same mistakes couldn’t be made again? Surely one of the fundamental basics for passing a test to own a football club would be to prove you have the financial capability to do so.