Its always puzzled me why Bates was put back in charge of the club, after taking it into administration. KPMG seemed to be inept because they allowed a new debt to materialise that none of the other bidders were aware of. The FSF bid was not the best bid and the other bids would have had a CVA approved so no points penalty (-15) the following season. Then we have the latest 'buy-out' saga going on, whereby Bates is trying to cling on to power and the potential new owners want rid of him completley or they walk away. They want it all or nothing and I can't blame them. This extract was cut and pasted from an article which came out last year: Could it be part of the big scam??? "The Football League have chosen not to apply the rule as robustly as we think we will be applying it," Scudamore said. That, though, seems a strange reason for the offshore owners to sell. Their investment would have been worth a fortune, at last, if Leeds did win promotion, so why would they not have happily furnished Scudamore with any information he wanted? And when they decided to sell, whatever their reasoning, why to Bates? Leeds is widely regarded as one of the last remaining good prospects as a football club to buy â in a one-club city, with a huge support which has stayed solidly loyal, paying eye-watering ticket prices in League One and the Championship. As Bates and the chief executive, Shaun Harvey, have proudly said, the club's financial position is healthy as the £35m debt was wiped out when Bates and his fellow directors put Leeds into administration. So did the investors, having waited through the rebuilding from League One under Simon Grayson's inspirational management, market the club far and wide, to Gulf state sheikhs and US sports-franchise owners, but find Ken Bates, with his offshore company, the one person offering the best deal? Bates told the high court, in a libel action brought against him by the former Leeds director Melvyn Levi in 2009, which Bates lost, that he had never put money into Leeds. Bates said he did not have cash; his wealth is mostly tied up in assets. So is this a good deal for Leeds fans who might think, with a bit of investment, their club could be in the Premier League? Yet of all these questions, the most curious episode in the Leeds United ownership saga remains the way Leeds emerged from administration. In that financial wreckage one offshore company, Astor Investment Holdings, was owed £17.6m after the two years in which the club was owned by the Forward Sports Fund, a company registered in the Cayman Islands, and run by Bates. There were four competing bids to buy the club, one of which was Forward, which wanted to install Bates as the chairman again. The administrator, Richard Fleming of KPMG, said Bates, his solicitor Mark Taylor and Harvey had stated there was no connection between Bates or Forward and Astor. Yet Astor said it would write off millions of pounds if Forward was allowed to have the club back with Bates as the chairman. If a competing bid for Leeds was accepted, Astor would add its £17.6m to the debts for repayment. When that issue came up in the libel trial the judge, Sir Charles Gray, told Bates he was "exceedingly puzzled" about why Astor would "kiss goodbye" to so much money, if it had no connection to Bates and Forward.
Forget about Bates..... The question is why do the The Football League, HMRC & Police not question this? What do tax payers of the UK have to do to see justice carried out?
It's frigging obvious Bates was the controlling owner of all these puppet companies and use administration to write off debts to other companies. He's then used all the profits from owning Leeds to pay back his own company debt and then to line his pockets.
