Post by QPR Report on Feb 11, 2009 9:02:45 GMT
Pretty disgusting
David Conn/Th Guardian - Former owners Shepherd and Hall got £146m from Newcastle• Accounts provide inventory of earnings
• Shepherd mounts staunch defence
Wednesday 11 February 2009
Freddy Shepherd, Sir John Hall and their families, the former major shareholders of Newcastle United, made almost £146m from their years at St James' Park, according to figures released by the club. The accounts for the year to 30 June 2008 provided a final inventory of the two families' earnings, because they sold their shares and left the board after Mike Ashley took over Newcastle in June 2007.
The Halls, who owned a larger stake than Freddy Shepherd and his brother, Bruce, made £95,748,570 in total from selling their shares, salaries and dividends, while the Shepherds made £50,099,604 altogether. The Halls and Shepherds bought their stakes in Newcastle largely by 1992, just before football's commercial boom, when clubs were not seen as vehicles to make money, and the Football Association intended membership of a board to be a form of public service.
The Halls and Shepherds were at the forefront of Newcastle's transformation on and off the field, and of the game's culture change to providing enormous returns for some in the boardrooms. At Newcastle, the directors worked unpaid until 1996, when Sir John was paid £836,803, his son Douglas £793,612 and Freddy Shepherd £750,000. The accounts said this "recognises the fact that the directors received no remuneration prior to this year".
The Halls' company, Cameron Hall, guaranteed borrowings of £3.5m and loaned the club money at 11% interest, but after Newcastle were floated on the stockmarket in 1997 the families no longer provided money for the club to invest.The fortune that they made Sir John retired soon afterwards, while Douglas Hall and Freddy Shepherd stayed on as directors; altogether Hall was paid £5.37m as a Newcastle director, Shepherd £4.7m. Hall was latterly paid his salary as a director of Newcastle United Football Club (International) Limited, based in the tax haven of Gibraltar – £494,655 in 2007.
Freddy Shepherd mounted a staunch defence of his and the Halls' record at the club, pointing to the St James' Park rebuilding, the signings of world-class players and relative success on the field.
"We just want the club to succeed," Shepherd said. "In our time the club played 110 games in Europe, reached Wembley and played in the Champions League. We built a new ground and a new training centre. I didn't want to sell and I did not need the money."
Bruce Shepherd was also appointed a non-executive director in 2003, and paid a total of £209,551 before his resignation in 2007. Sir John's daughter, Allison Antonopoulos, was appointed a non-executive director in February 2004; her pay by 2007 added up to £150,679. After the flotation, a dividend was declared every year until 2005 – as major shareholders the Halls received almost £14m altogether, the Shepherds £5.5m.
The Halls made £10m in December 1998 by selling 6.3% of the club to the cable company NTL, and made more than £20m from share sales before Ashley paid £55.34m for their remaining stake. Freddy Shepherd did not want to sell, but Ashley's purchase of the Halls' stake effectively forced him to; Ashley paid the Shepherds £38m for their 28% stake.
The accounts also show that between 2003 and 2007, the club paid £1.6m to rent warehouse space and houses from Bruce Shepherd's company, SMP Services. In 2007, Newcastle paid £82,000 to Triple S Sports Consultancy, a company run by Freddy Shepherd's son, Kenny, who rented office space in St James' Park. Shepherd said that dividends were determined by the whole board, and salaries by a remuneration committee. The warehouse space and houses – for new players – represented a good deal, he said, and he argued that employing his son as a consultant had been cheaper than using agents.
"It was good for us financially," Shepherd acknowledged of his time at Newcastle. "But we were just passing through. The club is an institution which really belongs to its supporters."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/feb/11/newcastle-united-freddy-shepherd-john-hall
David Conn/The Guardian -
Ashley counts cost as old guard count their riches• Former owners made £145.8m from Newcastle
• Ashley has put fortune on line and taken nothing
Mike Ashley's Newcastle United are pressing on with their hesitant charm offensive this week, with Derek Llambias, the club's managing director, stressing in the local newspaper Ashley's revised commitment to the club, the money he has put in, and making an extended plea for owner and fans to go marching on together.
The tragedy of Ashley's tenure at Newcastle – if that is not too grand a word – is that this was the takeover which should have gone so right. There was concern elsewhere that new owners buying Premier League clubs were overseas financial speculators who knew nothing of football and, at Manchester United and Liverpool, were loading flourishing clubs with debt. Ashley was English, loves football and had a great deal of cash to spend – £929m made personally from selling shares when his Sports Direct company floated on the stockmarket in March 2007.
Newcastle's previous owners, the outgoing chairman Freddy Shepherd and his brother Bruce, and Sir John Hall, his son Douglas and their family bought their majority stakes relatively cheaply for an initial estimated £3.3m by 1992, just before football boomed comercially. They steered the club since the early 1990s from the old Second Division to runners-up spot in the Premier League and European football at a rebuilt, 52,000-seat St James' Park, yet mostly without garnering affection from the Toon Army faithful.
Accounts recently published by Newcastle, for the year to June 2008, show how much more generous Ashley's contribution has been already, with debts paid off and £100m loaned interest free to the club, compared to the millions relentlessly earned from the club by the Halls and Shepherds. When Sir John, the Gateshead shopping-centre magnate, took over Newcastle, he promised that the club would herald north-east regeneration and revive the "Geordie nation". Whatever the outcome of that, the club certainly became hugely profitable for Sir John and his family.
The Halls and Freddy Shepherd, who became a director alongside them, took no salaries for the first few years, then made up for it in 1996: Sir John was paid £836,803, Douglas Hall £793,612 and Shepherd £750,000. The accounts said the payment "recognises the fact that the directors received no remuneration prior to this year".
Shepherd, who staunchly defends his and the Halls' record of achievement at Newcastle, acknowledged that after the club floated on the stockmarket in 1997, they never contributed money for the club to invest. Before that, he said, they had guaranteed loans – documents at the time noted that £3.5m of the club's borrowings were guaranteed by the Halls' company, Cameron Hall, and that Cameron Hall had loaned the club money, at 11% interest.
The latest accounts provide a final reckoning on the Shepherds' and Halls' era because they sold all their shares to Ashley in June 2007 and have also resigned as directors. Altogether, the two families made an extraordinary £145.8m from their years of involvement – the Halls made £95.7m, the Shepherds £50.1m, mostly in salaries, dividends and ultimately selling their shares. The Halls had already made £20.35m from selling portions of their shares before Ashley paid £55m for their remaining stake. Shepherd did not want to sell – he had steadily bought more shares – but was effectively forced to – Ashley paid Freddie and Bruce £38m. Shepherd did not receive a pay-off when he resigned as a director in July 2007 but Douglas Hall, paid a £494,655 salary package in 2007 via a Newcastle United company registered in the tax haven of Gibraltar, was entitled to two years' pay in compensation and received an additional £1.17m when he resigned.
The unrest and despondency on Tyneside now make it easy to forget how Ashley's arrival put a smile on local faces, a new owner who watched matches with supporters, drank on the Bigg Market and had £1bn in his pocket, too. The accounts show that having bought the club for £134m, Ashley paid off borrowings of £43m and cleared the overdraft, lending the club £100m on which he has chosen to waive interest. He has not declared a dividend nor paid himself a salary. In short, he has put a chunk of his considerable fortune on the line, and not taken a penny out.
Yet after the departure of the Geordie talisman Kevin Keegan as manager last September, Ashley's party ended. Fans infinitely preferred Keegan's charisma to the operations of Dennis Wise and the "cockney mafia" Ashley appointed in senior positions and, when their criticism hit, Ashley announced he wanted to sell. Only when no buyer could be found did Ashley announce in December that he was staying after all and wanted to "take the club forward together" with the fans. Llambias's local media work this week is part of that new project.
Ashley himself is still deeply reticent about talking to the press, so there is no public explanation about how a man canny enough to make almost £1bn cash from sports retailing allowed himself to have so hapless a time at Newcastle. His appointments, after his lawyer, Chris Mort, left following a year as the chairman, lacked experience of running football clubs. Llambias was previously a director of three London casinos, including Fifty, which Ashley is said to have visited. Tony Jimenez, briefly appointed vice-president responsible for player recruitment, was a director of a small sports agency. He is said to be a close friend of Wise and to have been key to Wise's appointment as director of football. One well-informed source said Ashley, Llambias and Jimenez were good friends; the three used to follow England and watch other football together, and Ashley wanted people he could trust in charge at Newcastle, because he believed football could be dodgy, particularly in its transfer dealings. Ashley is understood to have known Joe Kinnear, too, whom he appointed when Keegan left.
Some of what has happened can better be understood by considering the stage Ashley had reached in his life. He had worked in sports shops, then his retail company, since he left school at 16, then had finally made that £929m and, one friend says, wanted to enjoy himself. He bought Newcastle three months later almost on impulse, telling Mort to get the deal done without undertaking lengthy investigations of Newcastle's books. Supporting from the stands with his replica shirt on told of a man suddenly liberated, wanting to have a good time. Friends say he did want the club to be run well financially, hence the idea of appointing Wise to target young, good-value signings, but he seems to have underestimated how difficult football actually is on the inside and how public the ordure when it all goes wrong.
After a transfer window in which Shay Given and Charles N'Zogbia were sold, fans not profoundly cheered by the signings of Kevin Nolan, Ryan Taylor and Peter Lovenkrands will hope that Llambias's public appearance this week heralds Ashley getting a grip on the practical business of football. Otherwise, Freddy Shepherd's pointed observation – "anybody can buy a football club, not everybody can run one" – will continue to wound.
david.conn@guardian.co.
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/feb/10/newcastle-united-mike-ashley-john-hall-freddy-shepherd
David Conn/Th Guardian - Former owners Shepherd and Hall got £146m from Newcastle• Accounts provide inventory of earnings
• Shepherd mounts staunch defence
Wednesday 11 February 2009
Freddy Shepherd, Sir John Hall and their families, the former major shareholders of Newcastle United, made almost £146m from their years at St James' Park, according to figures released by the club. The accounts for the year to 30 June 2008 provided a final inventory of the two families' earnings, because they sold their shares and left the board after Mike Ashley took over Newcastle in June 2007.
The Halls, who owned a larger stake than Freddy Shepherd and his brother, Bruce, made £95,748,570 in total from selling their shares, salaries and dividends, while the Shepherds made £50,099,604 altogether. The Halls and Shepherds bought their stakes in Newcastle largely by 1992, just before football's commercial boom, when clubs were not seen as vehicles to make money, and the Football Association intended membership of a board to be a form of public service.
The Halls and Shepherds were at the forefront of Newcastle's transformation on and off the field, and of the game's culture change to providing enormous returns for some in the boardrooms. At Newcastle, the directors worked unpaid until 1996, when Sir John was paid £836,803, his son Douglas £793,612 and Freddy Shepherd £750,000. The accounts said this "recognises the fact that the directors received no remuneration prior to this year".
The Halls' company, Cameron Hall, guaranteed borrowings of £3.5m and loaned the club money at 11% interest, but after Newcastle were floated on the stockmarket in 1997 the families no longer provided money for the club to invest.The fortune that they made Sir John retired soon afterwards, while Douglas Hall and Freddy Shepherd stayed on as directors; altogether Hall was paid £5.37m as a Newcastle director, Shepherd £4.7m. Hall was latterly paid his salary as a director of Newcastle United Football Club (International) Limited, based in the tax haven of Gibraltar – £494,655 in 2007.
Freddy Shepherd mounted a staunch defence of his and the Halls' record at the club, pointing to the St James' Park rebuilding, the signings of world-class players and relative success on the field.
"We just want the club to succeed," Shepherd said. "In our time the club played 110 games in Europe, reached Wembley and played in the Champions League. We built a new ground and a new training centre. I didn't want to sell and I did not need the money."
Bruce Shepherd was also appointed a non-executive director in 2003, and paid a total of £209,551 before his resignation in 2007. Sir John's daughter, Allison Antonopoulos, was appointed a non-executive director in February 2004; her pay by 2007 added up to £150,679. After the flotation, a dividend was declared every year until 2005 – as major shareholders the Halls received almost £14m altogether, the Shepherds £5.5m.
The Halls made £10m in December 1998 by selling 6.3% of the club to the cable company NTL, and made more than £20m from share sales before Ashley paid £55.34m for their remaining stake. Freddy Shepherd did not want to sell, but Ashley's purchase of the Halls' stake effectively forced him to; Ashley paid the Shepherds £38m for their 28% stake.
The accounts also show that between 2003 and 2007, the club paid £1.6m to rent warehouse space and houses from Bruce Shepherd's company, SMP Services. In 2007, Newcastle paid £82,000 to Triple S Sports Consultancy, a company run by Freddy Shepherd's son, Kenny, who rented office space in St James' Park. Shepherd said that dividends were determined by the whole board, and salaries by a remuneration committee. The warehouse space and houses – for new players – represented a good deal, he said, and he argued that employing his son as a consultant had been cheaper than using agents.
"It was good for us financially," Shepherd acknowledged of his time at Newcastle. "But we were just passing through. The club is an institution which really belongs to its supporters."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/feb/11/newcastle-united-freddy-shepherd-john-hall
David Conn/The Guardian -
Ashley counts cost as old guard count their riches• Former owners made £145.8m from Newcastle
• Ashley has put fortune on line and taken nothing
Mike Ashley's Newcastle United are pressing on with their hesitant charm offensive this week, with Derek Llambias, the club's managing director, stressing in the local newspaper Ashley's revised commitment to the club, the money he has put in, and making an extended plea for owner and fans to go marching on together.
The tragedy of Ashley's tenure at Newcastle – if that is not too grand a word – is that this was the takeover which should have gone so right. There was concern elsewhere that new owners buying Premier League clubs were overseas financial speculators who knew nothing of football and, at Manchester United and Liverpool, were loading flourishing clubs with debt. Ashley was English, loves football and had a great deal of cash to spend – £929m made personally from selling shares when his Sports Direct company floated on the stockmarket in March 2007.
Newcastle's previous owners, the outgoing chairman Freddy Shepherd and his brother Bruce, and Sir John Hall, his son Douglas and their family bought their majority stakes relatively cheaply for an initial estimated £3.3m by 1992, just before football boomed comercially. They steered the club since the early 1990s from the old Second Division to runners-up spot in the Premier League and European football at a rebuilt, 52,000-seat St James' Park, yet mostly without garnering affection from the Toon Army faithful.
Accounts recently published by Newcastle, for the year to June 2008, show how much more generous Ashley's contribution has been already, with debts paid off and £100m loaned interest free to the club, compared to the millions relentlessly earned from the club by the Halls and Shepherds. When Sir John, the Gateshead shopping-centre magnate, took over Newcastle, he promised that the club would herald north-east regeneration and revive the "Geordie nation". Whatever the outcome of that, the club certainly became hugely profitable for Sir John and his family.
The Halls and Freddy Shepherd, who became a director alongside them, took no salaries for the first few years, then made up for it in 1996: Sir John was paid £836,803, Douglas Hall £793,612 and Shepherd £750,000. The accounts said the payment "recognises the fact that the directors received no remuneration prior to this year".
Shepherd, who staunchly defends his and the Halls' record of achievement at Newcastle, acknowledged that after the club floated on the stockmarket in 1997, they never contributed money for the club to invest. Before that, he said, they had guaranteed loans – documents at the time noted that £3.5m of the club's borrowings were guaranteed by the Halls' company, Cameron Hall, and that Cameron Hall had loaned the club money, at 11% interest.
The latest accounts provide a final reckoning on the Shepherds' and Halls' era because they sold all their shares to Ashley in June 2007 and have also resigned as directors. Altogether, the two families made an extraordinary £145.8m from their years of involvement – the Halls made £95.7m, the Shepherds £50.1m, mostly in salaries, dividends and ultimately selling their shares. The Halls had already made £20.35m from selling portions of their shares before Ashley paid £55m for their remaining stake. Shepherd did not want to sell – he had steadily bought more shares – but was effectively forced to – Ashley paid Freddie and Bruce £38m. Shepherd did not receive a pay-off when he resigned as a director in July 2007 but Douglas Hall, paid a £494,655 salary package in 2007 via a Newcastle United company registered in the tax haven of Gibraltar, was entitled to two years' pay in compensation and received an additional £1.17m when he resigned.
The unrest and despondency on Tyneside now make it easy to forget how Ashley's arrival put a smile on local faces, a new owner who watched matches with supporters, drank on the Bigg Market and had £1bn in his pocket, too. The accounts show that having bought the club for £134m, Ashley paid off borrowings of £43m and cleared the overdraft, lending the club £100m on which he has chosen to waive interest. He has not declared a dividend nor paid himself a salary. In short, he has put a chunk of his considerable fortune on the line, and not taken a penny out.
Yet after the departure of the Geordie talisman Kevin Keegan as manager last September, Ashley's party ended. Fans infinitely preferred Keegan's charisma to the operations of Dennis Wise and the "cockney mafia" Ashley appointed in senior positions and, when their criticism hit, Ashley announced he wanted to sell. Only when no buyer could be found did Ashley announce in December that he was staying after all and wanted to "take the club forward together" with the fans. Llambias's local media work this week is part of that new project.
Ashley himself is still deeply reticent about talking to the press, so there is no public explanation about how a man canny enough to make almost £1bn cash from sports retailing allowed himself to have so hapless a time at Newcastle. His appointments, after his lawyer, Chris Mort, left following a year as the chairman, lacked experience of running football clubs. Llambias was previously a director of three London casinos, including Fifty, which Ashley is said to have visited. Tony Jimenez, briefly appointed vice-president responsible for player recruitment, was a director of a small sports agency. He is said to be a close friend of Wise and to have been key to Wise's appointment as director of football. One well-informed source said Ashley, Llambias and Jimenez were good friends; the three used to follow England and watch other football together, and Ashley wanted people he could trust in charge at Newcastle, because he believed football could be dodgy, particularly in its transfer dealings. Ashley is understood to have known Joe Kinnear, too, whom he appointed when Keegan left.
Some of what has happened can better be understood by considering the stage Ashley had reached in his life. He had worked in sports shops, then his retail company, since he left school at 16, then had finally made that £929m and, one friend says, wanted to enjoy himself. He bought Newcastle three months later almost on impulse, telling Mort to get the deal done without undertaking lengthy investigations of Newcastle's books. Supporting from the stands with his replica shirt on told of a man suddenly liberated, wanting to have a good time. Friends say he did want the club to be run well financially, hence the idea of appointing Wise to target young, good-value signings, but he seems to have underestimated how difficult football actually is on the inside and how public the ordure when it all goes wrong.
After a transfer window in which Shay Given and Charles N'Zogbia were sold, fans not profoundly cheered by the signings of Kevin Nolan, Ryan Taylor and Peter Lovenkrands will hope that Llambias's public appearance this week heralds Ashley getting a grip on the practical business of football. Otherwise, Freddy Shepherd's pointed observation – "anybody can buy a football club, not everybody can run one" – will continue to wound.
david.conn@guardian.co.
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/feb/10/newcastle-united-mike-ashley-john-hall-freddy-shepherd