MEGA-RICH UNION SPENT £9m ON MEMORABILIA BUT WOULDN’T PAY £70k TO JLLOYD’S GRIEVING WIDOW

THE PfA’s former financial arm was more than £1million in the red when it went into liquidation, having squandered the personal savings of some of its members,

Sportsmail can reveal. As the pressure intensified on under-fire PfA chief executive Gordon Taylor last night, this newspaper was contacted by former players who blame the union for almost ruining their lives with bad financial advice. Company accounts show that PfA financial Management Ltd went into liquidation in 2009 owing more than £1m to its creditors, with ex-players among them. As a result of such advice, one footballer revealed he lost close to £80,000 and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Another who lost money on one of the PfA-recommended investment schemes was former PfA chairman Ritchie Humphreys, who now works full time for the union as a delegate liaison executive. He declined to comment last night. One player who asked to remain anonymous has joined a group of former pros totalling more than 300 supporting PfA chairman Ben Purkiss in calling for change at the PfA. Taylor has attempted to oust Purkiss on the grounds he is no longer eligible to be chairman because he is a non-contract player at Walsall. The PfA’s AGM, due to be held yesterday, was adjourned as a result. A former player who enjoyed a brief spell in the Premier League but spent most of his career in the lower tiers of the professional game has shown this newspaper evidence of the battle he went through to recover some of his savings after being advised to invest in a commercial property fund in 2007. The doomed investment was Gold 12, a unit trust which collapsed into administration and receivership, meaning the player’s money disappeared. The player said he was advised by Ian Dalziel, the former Derby County defender who became an independent financial adviser for PfA financial Management Ltd in 2002 and remained in the role until the financial arm of the union went under in 2009. When the player realised his money had gone, he contacted the PfA for help. ‘They were hopeless,’ he told Sportsmail. ‘No help at all. I had to find my own financial adviser to begin what was a long, stressful process to get some of the money back.’ Ultimately he had to resort to seeking compensation from the financial Services Compensation Scheme (fSCS) after PfA financial Management Ltd could not pay him back what they owed. The fSCS is a ‘last resort for customers of authorised financial services firms’ and its compensation fund is drawn from a levy it charges the industry. A letter sent to the player by the fSCS, and seen by Sportsmail, states he was indeed eligible to be paid the money he lost following his compensation claim against PfA financial Management Ltd. Dalziel, who continues to work as a financial adviser in the North East, was unavailable for comment last night. The PfA also declined to comment when asked to respond to questions about PfA financial Management Ltd. PfA financial Management Ltd

was founded in 1989 by Brendon Batson and others, with Batson apparently running the operation from the PFA’s Birmingham office. When the listed company went into liquidation in 2009, it also owed more than £40,000 to the Financial Services Authority and £112,000 in taxes to HMRC. The PFA have rightly been praised over the years for the support they have given to some members, even if the most recent PFA accounts reveal that the money paid into the benevolent fund amounts to around a quarter of Taylor’s staggering £2.29m salary. The PFA also have around £50m in their reserves, and their charitable arm spent more than £800,000 on football memorabilia in the year up to July 2018. In the union’s history, they have spent more than £9m on memorabilia. Yesterday, however, Sportsmail was contacted by Jlloyd Samuel’s widow Emma, who, in the wake of her husband’s death in a car crash in May, asked the PFA for £70,000 to help her pay off his debts and pay the rent for her and their children. They paid her £11,000, claiming that was the maximum they could offer. She told Sportsmail: ‘On the day he died, Jlloyd had just £2,000 in the bank and lots of debt. I didn’t have enough money to pay for his funeral and the rent for our house was overdue. ‘So I reached out to the PFA in the hope that they could assist. Gordon Taylor sent a letter of condolence and asked what the family needed. ‘Even though this was a very traumatic time I went through everything and supplied substantial detail and information regarding our circumstances. This showed that I needed £70,000 to get through the next six months, allowing myself and the children time to grieve and come to terms with what had happened. ‘We realised that the PFA could not supply long-term support, but this six months was critical. They wrote back saying they could offer only £11,000, suggesting that this was the maximum they could do given their resources. ‘We are left to wonder just how many professional football players passed away this year at such a young age and in such tragic circumstances? ‘Not many, if any, and yet the PFA’s ample resources could not stretch to supplying adequate support for one long-serving, and much-loved, member.’ The Premier League is maintaining a watching brief on developments in the hope of seeing a resolution to the civil war at the top of the organisation ahead of talks re-opening on their continued £25m-a-year funding of the union. Sportsmail understands that the PL do not believe it is their place to intervene in the dispute, with the decision on who runs the union one for players and members. They would also be reluctant to cut off all cash to the union, despite the fact that Taylor’s hard negotiating forced them in 1992 to pay the PFA vastly more than they wanted. The Premier League specify how most of the money they put into the PFA is spent, with Taylor’s salary forming a part of the smaller portion that is left to the union’s discretion. The PL could demand that the discretionary element is smaller if the dispute is not resolved. They declined to discuss the negotiations yesterday.