Clearly (as clear as it can be without insider knowledge)...KL wants/needs to sell club, but has been fending off the usual shysters as she wants a decent purchaser for a club she has some emotion invested in. Now she has decided on Lander and has spent a lot of time in negotiations and has now come up against the PL proper persons rule. Like negotiation to sell a house for several years and then finding your neighbour objecting to the look of your purchaser. There is a subtext of China deciding to crack down on businesses borrowing too much to buy businesses they regard as overpriced...apparently this has been happening....so Landers Sports considered too far from the real money source has pulled out and their parent company owned by Gao has stepped in. The question is how honest a person is Gao. He gave evidence in a bribery case which resulted in someone being executed and him being given immunity. KL wants a good result for us (hence her trying to hold on to 20%), but let's not forget this is a huge sum of money and buyers with that kind of money are rare. Sentiment is only worth so much. She feels she has done enough checking and must feel frustrated. If not Gao, then who? And will they be any more respectable if in the field of worldwide business....all businesses end up paying bribes somewhere (even if it is presented differently in the balance sheets). We need the Leihberrs Mark II....but where to find them. We are no longer small fry....so the pool of buyers is smaller.
In all likelihood, the reason why we seem to be pushing on with the Lander bid is the immediacy of it: if it falls through, we'll have to restart the process with another bidder, which could take months. She'd rather get the money in (this presumes they have money to go in, heh) and hand off control by the end of the season.
Even if a potential investor had a slight connection with a corrupt city officials case and some involvment with people executed by the state for corruption I think I might draw a line under that and move on. I don't care how much you check through the case this person was not smart enough to report to the government the circumstances immediately or walk away. Surely some alarm bells must ring - but according to her legal teams apparently not. Hmmmmm.... She, like so many of our loyal players over the years, must really want to move on.
Nothing really new or even that interesting but worth a post to bump the thread back up. http://www.atimes.com/article/swiss-saints-sino-sinners-chinas-soccer-shadow-play/
I was unaware that so many clubs were being linked to Chinese consortia....mainly because if it ain't Saints, I ain't interested. There was nothing much particularly about Gao, but enough about other Chinese companies to be concerned. I want us to be bought by a Swiss billionaire.
Another Swiss billionnaire.? Wouldn't you love it if the Swiss billionaire made their money out of making superb chocolate.? I don't think making cuckoo clocks would bring in enough pfennigs. Oops, wrong currency. Thinking German-Swiss again. Rather like that quite nice Liebherr family.
Ah well, I continually get my cuddly Swiss culture from Third Man Harry Lime/Orson Welles. I'll have to knock off the cuckoo clock from the list. Toblerone.?
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/saints/news/15301650.Saints_takeover_decision_expected/?ref=rss Looks like we may hear something soon.
I can't see this going through now. Rules have got harder after this past: http://news.sky.com/story/takeover-rows-spark-premier-league-bid-to-toughen-ownership-tests-10881228
