• Football League share transfer raises ownership questions
• Club was dogged by boardroom problems last season
Portsmouth are awaiting the transfer of their Football League share to their parent company-in-waiting, PFC Realisations. Fans hope that will mark the end of the sorry saga that led to their club’s near extinction earlier this year. But is that hope misplaced?
Throughout the ownership of Sasha Gaydamak, Pompey were dogged with rumours – repeatedly denied by both Gaydamak and the Premier League – that it was his father, Arkady, who really controlled the club. Ultimately the Premier League had only Gaydamak Jr’s word for that, since the club’s parent, Miland Development, was registered in the impenetrably secretive British Virgin Islands. Now the Football League, which became the club’s new regulator upon their relegation, has been presented with a similar situation.
For though we are told that the Hong Kong businessman Balram Chainrai is hoping to take over Pompey through PFC Realisations, it is impossible to check, because its sole shareholder is another BVI-registered shell, Sports Holdings (Asia) Ltd. Chainrai himself formerly had a close business relationship with Gaydamak senior. Indeed the £14.5m Chainrai invested in Portsmouth to gain control of the club had effectively been released from Gaydamak’s frozen accounts after Chainrai’s successful litigation for that sum through the Israeli courts.
Such are the particularities of Portsmouth’s troubled history, the intended lack of transparency is most unsatisfactory and surprising, given David Lampitt’s involvement as a director of PFC Realisations. After all, Lampitt was previously the Football Association’s head of compliance.
Clarke’s personal touch
Greg Clarke has invested much personal capital in claiming that under his chairmanship the Football League will guarantee greater transparency of its clubs’ ownership structures. He is about to stake a bit more.
For alongside David Lampitt as a director of PFC Realisations, the company hoping to take over Portsmouth, is John Redgate. Only three of the 11 companies on whose boards Redgate, an accountant, has served are still trading – the other eight are in liquidation or have already been dissolved.
But, usefully, two of those companies relate to the pension fund of Cable & Wireless, at which he served as a trustee between 1993 and 2000. That is just the time when Clarke was chief executive of Cable & Wireless Communications, so the warm relations between the two will doubtless ensure transparency will out.
Jordan able to relax
A report into Crystal Palace directors’ conduct in the lead-up to the club’s insolvency last season has been submitted to the Department of Business, Innovations and Skills, as the old DTI is now known. That is one of the matters detailed in the recently released administrators’ report that details events leading up to Steve Parrish’s close-season takeover. But Simon Jordan, who as chairman and owner through his Aspiration Holdings investment vehicle would be most accountable for whatever that report contains, has no cause to fear.
A source close to the administration process told Digger yesterday that the report’s submission to BIS was only logged in the administrators’ documents due to its being a statutory obligation, and
