Blues’ tangled web highlights big issues
WHO are the owners of Birmingham City? It is a simple question with a very complicated answer. Please, bear with me. Birmingham City FC is wholly owned by Birmingham City PLC, which in turn is owned by Birmingham Sports Holdings Ltd (75%), Oriental Rainbow Investments Ltd (21.64%) and Trillion Trophy Asia Ltd (0.21%), with a further 3.15 per cent of shares in public hands.
Mystery solved? Not so fast. Birmingham Sports Holdings Ltd is owned by - deep breath Trillion Trophy Asia (28.12%), Ever Depot Ltd (23.53%), Dragon Villa (17.08%), Global Mineral (2.8%), Join Surplus (2.7%), Huang Dongfeng (0.35% ) and Zhao Wenquing (0.35%).
Ready for more? St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground, is owned by Birmingham City Stadium Ltd, which is itself owned by Achiever Global Group Ltd (75%) and Oriental Rainbow Investments Ltd (25%).
Weird
Behind all of these weird and wonderful names are an assortment of East Asian entrepreneurs, chief amongst them the former chairman Paul Suen and a Cambodian businessman by the name of Vong Pech, whose 40 per cent stake makes him the biggest single shareholder in Birmingham City.
If you’re starting to nod off at this point, don’t worry. That’s almost certainly what the club’s owners intend.
Making something complicated and confusing is a time-honoured method of deterring excessive interest. In marketing, it’s called the breakage rate.
Companies will offer a deal – like a cash rebate on a purchase - but to claim the money you’ll need to fill in a form, then wait six weeks, then chase the company over the telephone.
One infamous example was the company Hoover who, having promised free flights to the USA in exchange for the purchase of a vacuum cleaner, told customers in London that they could only fly from Glasgow and customers in Glasgow that they could only fly from London.
Make it tricky, and people will give up. It is why the EFL’s owners and directors test so often falls apart; they simply do not have the time or resources to keep digging.
One man who doesn’t give up, however, is Dan Ivery. Ivery is a Birmingham City fan who runs Almajir.net, a website full of impeccably researched content regarding the murky business of who controls Blues. The figures above are his work.
This month, Ivery flew to Cambodia with the intention of learning more about Pech, who has never spoken publicly about his interest in Birmingham and whose online footprint provides only the sketchiest of details.
What Ivery discovered is that Pech isn’t Cambodian, and he isn’t called Pech. He is a Chinese citizen called Wang Dong, who changed his name and nationality in order to run Cambodian companies.
Neglect
This is entirely legitimate, but it begs an obvious question. If Ivery had to travel 6,000 miles to learn this information, are the EFL aware of it? And if not, how can they possibly be certain that Vong Pech is a fit and proper person to own a football club?
He may be. He may not. It must also be said that Birmingham are far from the only club in English football with an opaque ownership structure.
Yet this is a man who is currently the major shareholder at a club adrift on a sea of disinterest and neglect, with a stadium so decrepit that parts of it are closed to the public.
More worryingly, his companies are owed around £25m by Blues, a sum that has the potential to put the 127-year-old club out of business. Shouldn’t he be compelled to tell the authorities who he is, and what he wants?
At a time when the issue of club ownership is being debated in parliament and stricter regulation proposed, the revelation the EFL almost certainly don’t know either of those things has exposed just how feeble current protections are. A final decision on regulation is due within weeks, and the government must act to force faceless owners out of the shadows.