Notts County - explanation required.

[KenTheLandlord]

Please could someone explain what's been going on at Notts County since about August 2009? I mean, are they skint/loaded or what? Why is Sven there if they're skint? And who are the people running the club etc?

Yours sincerely

Confused of Prestwich.

Interesting this one. They thought they'd been bought by a Saudi group Qadbak, who were the supposed owners of Munto Finance. Qadbak were supposedly backed by a Middle Eastern consortium (who were un-named at the time) and on that basis, the supporters trust that owned 60% Notts County agreed to sell it. Frankly they were idiots as they seemingly took no steps to ensure that the promised funds were in place or who the real owners were. The Qatari royal family were mentioned but they denied it.

Puzzingly the new owners passed the "Fit & Proper Persons Test" (although they weren't publicly named) but the Football League then decided to re-open its enquiries when ti became clear that everything was not as it seemed.

Last month Munto sold the club to Trembling (formerly Commercial Director of Everton) for a nominal sum.

It now looks like the real owners were a group closer to home, including the current chairman Peter Trembling and father and son Peter & Nathan Willett. Here's an article in the Guardian.

What a bewildering web of companies Nathan Willett and his old mucker Peter Trembling are involved with. Willett and his father, Peter, are the directors of Qadbak, the British Virgin Islands-registered trust that bought Notts County and the Formula One team BMW Sauber. They are also the sole directors of Swiss Commodity Holding, the recently-incorporated firm that gave Sven-Goran Eriksson a shareholding that may or may not be worth something.

Trembling is the executive chairman of Notts County, where Peter Willett sits on the board. Last November Trembling made Willett-the-younger a director in his Nottingham-based company, Affinity Partnerships. That firm's secretary was a certain Toni Stevenson, who had also been secretary of the Jersey-based Belgravia Group, and it just so happens that until 2006 Affinity's accounts stated it was "controlled by its parent company, Belgravia Group Limited, a company registered in Jersey".

Bear with me. Nathan Willett was already a director of Belgravia Management, a wholly owned subsidiary in Jersey of the Belgravia Group, which in 2006 changed its name to Affinity Management and whose secretary was also Ms Stevenson. Only, as Trembling has been careful to point out to Digger, it's not that Belgravia, the company currently under investigation by Jersey's fraud squad. No: they just shared the same St Helier offices as the one that is. With all this on his plate it's a wonder Willett has time for football.

It doesn't look like they have any money and that Sven has, yet again, been hoodwinked by fake Arabs.

So Swiss Toni has had a sex change.

 

[standupifyouhatemanu]

I'm a CITY fan living a mile away from Meadow lane, as stated above the Arabs came in with promise of money, hoodwinked Sven into joining, bought loads of players, Hughes as mentioned and also Kasper. When Campbell came I think he saw the writing on the wall and could see something was wrong and did one after one game.

The latest winding up order according to radio Nottingham is because they have lost 200k in revenue from the last 2 home game postponments and also an away match called off at Bournemouth which was due to be on Sky so they lost the TV money.

Hope they survive though...

 

[JOGAMIGMOG]

Sounds like Peter Trembling is a crook and should be locked up for deception!

 

[GDB]

Supposed "big money" owners fooked off. Sickening really for the fans. I feel for them.

Seen happen so many times and this won't be the last by a fair bit.

We have the good guys now thank god but it could've been diffeent under Thaskin as someone pointed out.

 

[MJV2419]

Wonder if Kasper regrets leaving now

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

I'm a CITY fan living a mile away from Meadow lane, as stated above the Arabs came in with promise of money,

But that's the point - there don't seem to have been any Arabs, let alone any money. It's these crooks Trembling & Willett, plus another name got mentioned - Russell King.

Here's part of another Guardian article. Long read but quite shocking:

Russell King, a senior representative of Qadbak, the offshore company that owns Notts County, has had £1.9m of his assets frozen by the courts in Jersey over an unpaid debt. King emerged as a key figure at the heart of a web of companies connected with the Notts County takeover.

As well as leading negotiations with the supporters' trust over the purchase of the club by the investment vehicle Qadbak in July, and the appointment of Peter Trembling as chief executive, King and his business associate, Nathan Willett, were involved with Sven-Goran Eriksson's recruitment to Meadow Lane as director of football. The actual owners of the club have never been revealed and Eriksson admitted yesterday that he had never met them.

In a separate development it emerged that Eriksson had been promised a paper fortune by Willett and his father, Peter, who is a director of Notts County, if he worked on a separate company of which they are the sole directors. The former England manager was handed a substantial shareholding in a Zurich-registered company called Swiss Commodity Holding AG, whose directors are the Willetts. Like Sol Campbell, who quit the club on Tuesday, Eriksson was asked to work as an ambassador for the company's many interests overseas.

Eriksson was assured that when the company, which describes itself on its website as a multinational with "a total portfolio value in excess of 160 billion swiss francs (£97bn) [focusing] on natural resources, infrastructure and industry", is floated on the stock market, his stock would be worth millions overnight.

Eriksson insists privately that he was already excited about joining the club for its "project" and that the promises of riches were simply an added attraction. He is currently working to a contract with the club's holding company, Blenheim 1862, which pays him a salary that is above the market rate for a League Two director of football but a lot less than his usual salary.

However, it is understood that he was initially assured Swiss Commodity Holding AG would be floated on the stock market in an initial public offering within three or four weeks of his agreeing to join the club in June. That has not yet happened, although there are fresh assurances it will take place before the end of next month.

To sum this up, it appears Sven was promised shares in a company supposedly controlling mineral assets worth billions of dollars and about to float on the Stock Market. However, despite apparently being the biggest mining company in the world (according to the value of assets it supposedly controlled) it was only set up last year and none of the other big mining companies have ever heard of it. It seems to be heavily involved with North Korea (which ties in to the stories linking Sven to the North Korean football manager's job).

They still haven't floated (surprise, surprise) and it would seem that Sven has fallen for a version of the so-called boiler room scam in which worthless shares are sold to gullible investors on the grounds that they have access to either natural resources or technology that make them potentially very valuable. The investors are promised phenomenal gains if they get in early, before the planned flotation. Of course, once they hand over their money, they never see it again. This lot do appear to be a bunch of con-men and I wonder if Sven has put any of his own money in?

 

[marco]

fuk could you imagine it if our arabs bailled out it would be like the wall street crash 1929 i'd be the first to jump off asda's roof