Can anyone tell me, can a club sell its own ground back to itself more than once in a season. It just occurred to me, when i was having a chat with my mate (really nice) wednesday fan. He reckons they should go all out and break all the rules to get all the best players and pay big for them......like a one shot go at the prem. I was absolutely speechless, not like him at all
They should go for it, I never tire of watching my box set of Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France 7 times. The fact that he'd cheated is just a footnote in history.......
Maybe they can sell the ground for £80m, buy it back for £1 and then sell it again for £80m etc etc etc, thus allowing the owner to put billions into the club. If they get away with it, then football has truly gone mad...
Thats was genuinely my mates idea. He reckon the rules are just guidelines and everybody bends them.....i tried to remind we dont and a couple of others.....its why we struggle to compete at this level.
I dont think its legal to do that regardless of the EFL rules it would look a bit like someone was washing their money
I guess its the same as over (or under)inflating the price and then the regulators (if they actually go this deep) find there has been no paperwork done re the purchase, im thinking local searches and the like. Do we actually know if the EFL have any mechanism for checking? It would actually be a vey good way to launder money from say an overseas investor. My point here is how much the EFL adhere to finacial crime and why i believe they are no longer fit for purpose, in its current remit. It appears foreign (or home based) investor's come over here and "self certify" their suitability to run a club based on them saying "yes we definately can run this club for 2 years".... except in Wigans case it was more like 4 weeks!
Window dressing can be illegal (where you purposefully present accounts to give an inaccurate view to benefit your needs at the time), but not always so. I do find it amazing that a company is falsifying information to meet EFL rules. I couldn't tell you at what point a window dressing act becomes outright fraud, but making up businesses to put money in, would certainly be a criminal act if it were the other way round and extracting money from one entity into a deceptive non company. It really is time some of these people faced criminal proceedings and were struck off and banned from being a company director.
Pedant point: Washdays EFL investigation is focused on the date of the ground sale not the amount of the ground sale. They fudged the “sale” date for maximum benefit.
Three offences spring readily to mind. False accounting Sec 17 Theft Act 1968. Fraudulent trading Sec 993 Companies Act 2006 or Fraud by abuse of position Sec 4 Fraud Act 2006. However, all of these require a fraudulent intention. My take on this is that phrase relates to depriving others by fraudulent acts. There are other offences relating to Directors but these offences and all the other ones I can think of are built around stopping Directors taking money out of companies when they shouldnt and arent really aimed at Directors putting money in when they really shouldnt. The only thing Wednesday is accused of is breaking a set of sporting rules. The governing body is best placed to regulate this and have punitive sanctions. Whether they use them is another issue.
I've read somewhere the company set they set up to buy the ground didn't exist at the said time of the sale and they valued the ground in the previous years accounts at 20m only to sell and buy it to themselves for 3 times the amount.
Makes me wonder why the legal authorities in Britain haven't investigated football clubs or even worse, fake britain havent featured an episode
