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REVIVAL
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Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 49,008
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REVIVAL
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 49,008
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Liverpool Takeover Bid
The owner of the Boston Red Sox Major League Baseball team, John W Henry, has posted an outline offer to buy Liverpool Football Club, according to sources close to the discussions. Liverpool's chairman, Martin Broughton, presented Henry's bid, along with one from Asian business interests, understood to be Chinese, at a board meeting today.
It also emerged that the club's owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, had tried to make wholesale changes in the boardroom. "[The owners] sought to remove managing director Christian Purslow and commercial director Ian Ayre from the board, seeking to replace them with Mack Hicks and Lori Kay McCutcheon," read a statement on the club website. "This matter is now subject to legal review and a further announcement will be made in due course. Meanwhile Martin Broughton, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre continue to explore every possible route to achieving a sale of the Club at the earliest opportunity."
Both the US and Asian bids were described as "credible" by reliable sources today and Broughton, Liverpool's managing director, Christian Purslow, and Ian Ayre, the club's commercial director, were understood to favour entering serious discussions. However, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the American owners of Liverpool, which owes £237m to Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia, were said to have rejected the offers in principle because they do not provide enough money for their shares.
One informed source described Henry as "extremely interested" in buying Liverpool, saying he has the means and expertise required, as evidenced by the Red Sox's iconic stadium, Fenway Park. Liverpool supporters will be naturally suspicious of any bid coming from the US after the bitter experience with Hicks and Gillett and will want assurances that the finance is real, not borrowed. Hicks and Gillett engineered a "leveraged buy-out" of Liverpool in February 2007, with £185m entirely borrowed from RBS, then made the capital and interest the club's responsibility to repay.
The outlines of the bids are understood to be broadly the ones which have been considered as the only credible solution for the club – repaying the banks but giving little profit to Hicks and Gillett. The banks, both of which collapsed in the economic crisis, – RBS is now 84% owned by the British taxpayer – want their loans back on 15 October but there is no apparent prospect of either of the owners being able to repay them. Despite that, Hicks and Gillett are known to have held out for a handsome profit on their shares. Neither could be reached for comment tonight.
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05-10-2010, 10:10 PM
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