Following on from Tuesday's post about the interim sale of ESI (Charlton Athletic Football Club), it is now clear that the club is effectively drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. After two years of failure to agree a sale of the club with various interested parties, Roland Duchatelet finally thought his determination to get every penny he had lost on the club over five/six years had proven successful. None of the interested parties could accept his valuation for the 'assets' (The Valley and Sparrows Lane) until along came the Fake Sheikh and Matt 'Mouthall.'
Nimer and Southall proved to be potless chancers who had clearly accepted the long-term purchase obligations based on the simple premise that they wouldn't be around long enough to honour them and they knew that, even through the Courts, Duchatelet couldn't get blood out of a stone. Chris Farnell couldn't even get Southall to pay his legal bill through the Courts and Nimer also had the benefit of being a Syrian floating around the Middle East - he wasn't going to be easy to bring before the UK Courts.
The 'interim owner' Paul Elliott is so anonymous, no-one even knows what he looks like and if he had even an ounce of interest in running Charlton Athletic, he would surely have introduced himself and not remained hidden away and silent. Absolutely nothing, which tells us all we need to know, if it wasn't already pretty obvious, that he is playing a part-time role to enable Nimer and Farnell to ensure Southall doesn't gain even more money from the sale of the club. As I said on Tuesday, the plan must be to leverage a decent fee for ESI now that Southall's had his 35p back and to do it quickly to avoid incurring operating costs for the club.
It would appear that Huw Jenkins' interest in the club has waned. He has quoted the risk of relegation in connection with the price of the club but presumably also now understands the intricacies of the former-Directors debt claims as well as the onerous £50m asset obligation that ESI signed-up to. That may also have scared off the other rumoured interested parties. All of course except Andrew Barclay and Peter Varney.
Varney knows the detail inside out and Barclay will have been strongly advised against paying over the odds and that would mean not accepting the £50m asset clause as is. Whilst not referring to any takeover specifics, Barclay has taken to Twitter to express his shock to find a professional football club with a strong history over 115 years in such a parlous state, largely enabled by a woefully short regulation regime that means the governing body (EFL) have no say over the sale of clubs, whose Owners & Directors Test (Fit n Proper persons) clearly fails repeatedly (RIP Bury FC, Nimer & Southall etc) and whose slothfulness only aids the fleet-footed wrong-uns who prey on the game.
By all accounts, Duchalatet is standing firm by his £50m price for the assets and is now playing chicken with Barclay and Varney. Whilst this plays out, Elliot and Farnell may well have a Plan B which could be to flip the club again onto more unscrupulous characters.
In conclusion, having exhausted all the credible would-be investors in Charlton Athletic Football Club, Duchatelet now finds himself possibly dealing with the last realistic buyers. I say this because Varney has, until now, kept his interests in taking control of the club (albeit via third parties with the money) largely quiet. We know he has made an approach before (Meire blanked him for ages and then refused to connect him with Duchtalet and Duchatelet then bounced him back to Meire when he went direct) although he never acknowledged that was a takeover proposal, but I am a betting man and my money was on it. The fact that he had to break cover like he has done at the eleventh hour suggests it's a last throw of the dice. I am sure he wanted to see how it played out with the others and that Administration might have been his best option given he would be dealing with someone you could trust and when the club would be free of debt and a bargain - not that he would want to have started with a points deduction.
We have to hope and pray that Duchatelet finally sees that he won't get a better opportunity to wash his hands of the club and recoup a large chunk of his losses. I don't accept that he wants a property play without the club because planning permission would be a huge risk at the Valley and Sparrows Lane and the likely scale of any permitted development would be minimised which would severely restrict the size of the opportunity i.e. he would struggle to make more than he would selling now for a realistic price without all the risk and time involved.
Andrew Barclay can fund the acquisition and running of the club - I am confident of that - but no-one pays ten or twenty million pounds over-the-odds when they can simply walk away or looking elsewhere. Especially when it's clear no-one else has been prepared to do it and no-one else will either. As I said at the start, this looks like our last chance of proper ownership capable of restoring the fortunes of the club and giving future generations of football supporters in south-east London and Kent a club they can be proud of as they continue family traditions of generations. Let us hope that Barclay and Varney can articulate their position fully and get Duchatelet to finally see it's also his best opportunity too.
Wouldn't it be brilliantly reinvigorating to get back to the halcyon days when all we worried about was the football and when we trusted the owners to do their job and keep us informed. A time when we were all proud of our club, it's Community Trust and the football we aspired to play. Peter Varney ran the club then too....
Nimer and Southall proved to be potless chancers who had clearly accepted the long-term purchase obligations based on the simple premise that they wouldn't be around long enough to honour them and they knew that, even through the Courts, Duchatelet couldn't get blood out of a stone. Chris Farnell couldn't even get Southall to pay his legal bill through the Courts and Nimer also had the benefit of being a Syrian floating around the Middle East - he wasn't going to be easy to bring before the UK Courts.
The 'interim owner' Paul Elliott is so anonymous, no-one even knows what he looks like and if he had even an ounce of interest in running Charlton Athletic, he would surely have introduced himself and not remained hidden away and silent. Absolutely nothing, which tells us all we need to know, if it wasn't already pretty obvious, that he is playing a part-time role to enable Nimer and Farnell to ensure Southall doesn't gain even more money from the sale of the club. As I said on Tuesday, the plan must be to leverage a decent fee for ESI now that Southall's had his 35p back and to do it quickly to avoid incurring operating costs for the club.
It would appear that Huw Jenkins' interest in the club has waned. He has quoted the risk of relegation in connection with the price of the club but presumably also now understands the intricacies of the former-Directors debt claims as well as the onerous £50m asset obligation that ESI signed-up to. That may also have scared off the other rumoured interested parties. All of course except Andrew Barclay and Peter Varney.
Varney knows the detail inside out and Barclay will have been strongly advised against paying over the odds and that would mean not accepting the £50m asset clause as is. Whilst not referring to any takeover specifics, Barclay has taken to Twitter to express his shock to find a professional football club with a strong history over 115 years in such a parlous state, largely enabled by a woefully short regulation regime that means the governing body (EFL) have no say over the sale of clubs, whose Owners & Directors Test (Fit n Proper persons) clearly fails repeatedly (RIP Bury FC, Nimer & Southall etc) and whose slothfulness only aids the fleet-footed wrong-uns who prey on the game.
By all accounts, Duchalatet is standing firm by his £50m price for the assets and is now playing chicken with Barclay and Varney. Whilst this plays out, Elliot and Farnell may well have a Plan B which could be to flip the club again onto more unscrupulous characters.
In conclusion, having exhausted all the credible would-be investors in Charlton Athletic Football Club, Duchatelet now finds himself possibly dealing with the last realistic buyers. I say this because Varney has, until now, kept his interests in taking control of the club (albeit via third parties with the money) largely quiet. We know he has made an approach before (Meire blanked him for ages and then refused to connect him with Duchtalet and Duchatelet then bounced him back to Meire when he went direct) although he never acknowledged that was a takeover proposal, but I am a betting man and my money was on it. The fact that he had to break cover like he has done at the eleventh hour suggests it's a last throw of the dice. I am sure he wanted to see how it played out with the others and that Administration might have been his best option given he would be dealing with someone you could trust and when the club would be free of debt and a bargain - not that he would want to have started with a points deduction.
We have to hope and pray that Duchatelet finally sees that he won't get a better opportunity to wash his hands of the club and recoup a large chunk of his losses. I don't accept that he wants a property play without the club because planning permission would be a huge risk at the Valley and Sparrows Lane and the likely scale of any permitted development would be minimised which would severely restrict the size of the opportunity i.e. he would struggle to make more than he would selling now for a realistic price without all the risk and time involved.
Andrew Barclay can fund the acquisition and running of the club - I am confident of that - but no-one pays ten or twenty million pounds over-the-odds when they can simply walk away or looking elsewhere. Especially when it's clear no-one else has been prepared to do it and no-one else will either. As I said at the start, this looks like our last chance of proper ownership capable of restoring the fortunes of the club and giving future generations of football supporters in south-east London and Kent a club they can be proud of as they continue family traditions of generations. Let us hope that Barclay and Varney can articulate their position fully and get Duchatelet to finally see it's also his best opportunity too.
Wouldn't it be brilliantly reinvigorating to get back to the halcyon days when all we worried about was the football and when we trusted the owners to do their job and keep us informed. A time when we were all proud of our club, it's Community Trust and the football we aspired to play. Peter Varney ran the club then too....
Hope springs eternal, but realty hits us like a hammer !
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