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Articles about football clubs facing or going into administration.
Portsmouth have exited admninistration and been sold to Balram Chainrai, Levi Kushnir and Deepak Chainrai. The Football League has lifted the transfer embargo imposed on Pompey, but all deals will require the League’s approval, while the club must also submit monthly financial reports for monitoring.
It looks as if Portsmouth is set to come out of administration soon. An agreement has been reached with former owner Sacha Gaydamak to pay off the £2.2m he is owed in instalments over five years. Former Hull chairman Paul Duffen, a somewhat controversial figure, claims to have put together a consortium to buy the club.
Portsmouth’s administrator, Andrew Andronikou, is much more optimistic about the future of the club than the tone of yesterday’s statement by Pompey. Indeed, he criticised the statement as ‘premature’. The club was just as likely to come out of administration as go into liquidation in the short term.
It looks as if Portsmouth football club is going to close. Talks with main creditor and former owner Sacha Gaydamak have broken down and it is likely that the administrator will now liquidate the club.
Portsmouth has suffered from mismanagement by successive owners. Given the dedication of Pompey fans, it is likely that they will form a phoenix club. But there may yet be an eleventh hour rescue.
Former director Giovanni di Stefano is interested in owning Dundee. The flamboyant Italian lawyer was last on the board in 2003 and thinks he has unfinished business at Dens Park. He thinks that £300,000 to £500,000 could see the club through the season.
Dundee’s chances of survival are put by its adminstrator at 50-50. Bryan Jackson has been involved with football club administrations at Clydebank and Motherwell and says he would not have taken the job if he did not think there was a chance of success. But even with cuts in the squad and staff, he only has enough cash flow to keep going to Christmas.
The Dundee fan interviewed on Radio 5 this morning took a bleak view of the survival prospects of the club which has entered administration. The club had to deal with a much larger debt, some £23m, when it was last in adminstration, but that was not in the middle of a financial crisis.
Portsmouth are to stay in administration after the Football League decided not to return their golden share in the competition, which would have allowed the takeover by Balram Chainrai to go ahead. The league is not satisfied on four items, although it is not clear what those are at this stage. The club will not suffer any points deductions, but need to come out of administration by the end of the season or they will be thrown out of the competition.
The situation at Dundee appears to have become more serious with a threat that the club might have to be liquidated if its finances cannot be sorted out in the next four weeks. It is believed to have overall debts of around £2m.
The club’s benefactor, Calum Melville, has contributed £200,000 to paying off the club’s tax debt which pushed it into administration. Another £200,000 is needed and half of that has pledged by local business people.
Liverpool would almost certainly be docked nine points if the eventual route to ownership for New England Sports Ventures (NESV) involved going into administration. Earlier indications from the Premier League suggested administration of Kop Holdings would not fall foul of insolvency rules on the grounds that the insolvency would apply to the holding company rather than the club itself. However, the situation has been clarified and NESV have been told that administration of Kop Holdings would incur a 9-point penalty.