Hoffman to fight for City deal
A lot of times I feel like giving up because these are very difficult people to deal with. However, to quote Jimmy Hill, we will fight until the game is won Gary Hoffman
GARY Hoffman has signalled that he will not give up on his attempt to buy Coventry City.
The club’s former vice chairman has also indicated he has received extra financial backing in the wake of having two offers rejected as “derisory” by club owners Sisu.
Speaking exclusively to the Telegraph, Mr Hoffman said: “A lot of times I feel like giving up because these are very difficult people to deal with.
“However, to quote Jimmy Hill, we will fight until the game is won.”
Mr Hoffman, who left the board in 2011, said he had been contacted by additional investors since submitting his bids - the latest of which could have totalled in excess of £10million.
As the Telegraph revealed on Thursday, a bid for the club was submitted to Sisu last weekend following the club’s relegation to League Two.
It is understood the initial offer included a six-figure up front payment with the potential for add-ons.
That is significantly more than the £1 Sisu paid when they took over the club in December 2007. However, the hedge fund claims to have invested more than £70million since then.
The bid was turned down by Sisu, although talks continued between the consortium and Sisu chief executive Joy Seppala.
A second bid, believed to be £1.2m up front with performance related add-ons totalling in excess of £10m, was submitted on Friday and immediately turned down. Mr Hoffman was reluctant to elaborate on the details of the offers, or the ongoing talks with Sisu, insisting that negotiations should take place away from the public eye and in a professional manner. The Telegraph understands Mr Hoffman’s consortium is made up of seven businessmen from the local area although, publicly, their identities are being kept under wraps. Their motivation for wanting to take on the club has been explained as a desire to give something back to CCFC by putting money in over the next few years to get it back to first League One and then the Championship. Mr Hoffman has repeatedly tried to get involved with the club since resigning from the board following disagreements with Sisu in 2011.
The closest he previously came was in 2011 when a consortium he fronted submitted a £1 bid, with the promise of a further £30m to be invested into the club. Coventry’s then-chairman, Ken Dulieu, poured scorn over the bid with no information revealed about the investors involved.
But details were eventually leaked and it emerged that Ken Bruce, a retired lawyer and a former chairman of the investment vehicle Investing in Sport, had been involved and the football men behind the bid were former Coventry City player Sam Allardyce and Howard Wilkinson, who had twice been the England national team’s caretaker manager
Hoffman also later tried, but failed, to get Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin, chairman of the Wanda Group, to back a bid. He later supported a bid from Texan property tycoon Preston Haskell IV to buy the club out of administration in 2013.
But that takeover attempt was doomed to failure due to the amount of debt Sisu companies were owed by CCFC, giving the hedge fund the upper hand when the administrator came to deciding which bid represented the best outcome for those owed money.