Anybody Got £100M ?

[themn]

Hicks and Gillett given three weeks to accept £100m deal
New York hedge fund imposes deadline on offer for 40 per cent stake in Liverpool

By Ian Herbert
Thursday, 18 March 2010


Liverpool's American owners are under more financial pressure to settle their debts than has previously been thought, with the New York-based company bidding to take control of the club imposing a three-week deadline to take or leave their offer.

The Rhone Group's proposed £100m investment for a 40 per cent share would enable the Liverpool chief executive, Christian Purslow, to deliver the entire sum to the Royal Bank of Scotland, the club's bankers, to pay down £100m of debt as the bank has demanded. But the time pressures the club currently faces are also compounded by the fact that Liverpool appear to have just 20 days to deliver some of that £100m figure to the bank. The presumption has always been that the deadline is July, by which time the club's current debt facility expires and must be renegotiated.

Liverpool's predicament appears to leave Rhone Group's partners Steve Langman and Robert Agostinelli in a strong position to take over a controlling stake – despite having offered a price which values the club at a half of the £500m Tom Hicks and George Gillett rejected from Dubai International Capital two years ago. There are currently no other prospective buyers lined up for Liverpool.


One source close to the process has said the half-dozen other potential investors the Anfield club seem confident of securing will not be new prospects but those whose previous bids have come to nothing.

Liverpool indicated last night that there was no precise deadline date for repaying the £100m and that there is some degree of leeway. The ultimate sanction would be RBS taking over, although that is highly unlikely as RBS is a state-owned bank. Running a Premier League club is not high on the agenda of a bank which announced a £2.6bn operating loss for the last financial year. But the endgame for Hicks and Gillett is certainly far closer than has been appreciated.

A 20-day target from today would make the 6 April the deadline for the repayment of some of the money – the start of the new financial year and the day after Easter Monday. Purslow has been saying for several weeks that he wanted his pursuit of new finance wrapped up by "Easter".

RBS does not appear to be anxious about the precise repayment date for the £100m it has demanded, though that may in part be a result of the confidence which the Rhone Group has created. But the pressing deadlines have created additional pressure for Liverpool and another consideration is the club's tortuous struggle to qualify for next season's Champions League.

Non-qualification would create a hole in next season's budget and would make Hicks and Gillett's position at Anfield less tenable. One source with insider knowledge of Liverpool's search for new investors told Sporting Intelligence website that several investors are delaying offers while they wait to see if non-qualification drives down the price. "Qualification is not necessarily the best outcome for would-be investors," the source said.

Rhone is aware of this, though its belief that its own offer of £110m-£115m can come to fruition is also based on the strong relationship formed with Purslow over weeks of negotiations leading up to the bid which was tabled at midnight last Friday.

The mystery surrounding the prospective investors led the Spirit of Shankly supporters' group yesterday to call on Purslow to explain "who exactly are these investors." Langman and Agostinelli are certainly not the "billionaires" they have been widely described as over the past five days, but multi-millionaires who would not be paying their own money to take over the club but investing the funds put into their hands for management.

Though the clock is ticking down on the Americans, RBS is understood to believe that a deal to deliver the club into new hands will be concluded quickly – possibly within two weeks – and that Rhone Group's interest has the potential to persuade other prospective buyers who have dragged their feet to make themselves known.

 

[themn]

Article On The Rhone Group

Mods, you may want to merge this with my other post.

I grant you permission to do so *waves hand*

Friends of world leaders with a plan for Anfield
From acquaintances of Sarkozy, to investors in toy shops – Ian Herbert and Nick Harris on the men making a £100m bid for Liverpool

Thursday, 18 March 2010


Liverpool fans have witnessed too many false dawns to harbour illusions about the latest possible saviours to be linked to their football club, but they can perhaps be forgiven that there is some serious money around this time. Rhone Group's senior partners include Robert Agostinelli, whose ex-wife Mathilde is a senior executive at Prada. He is an acquaintance of French president Nicolas Sarkozy and has spoken with deference about Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi. Both Agostinelli and Steve Langman, another partner at Rhone, have invested in the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

But the new names issuing around the environs of L4 are actually in a different bracket to many of those that have been sounded before. These two are no billionaires and certainly not in the same stratosphere as those – from Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to Indians Mukesh Ambani and Subrata Roy – who have been linked with the club before in these turbulent past few years. The Rhone Group, with offices in New York, Paris and London, has an annual turnover of just £5.9m according to its most recent accounts. The critical factor is that the firm is not in possession of the funds it invests. Like any fund management outfit, it invests cash for others – be it pension funds or the savings of high net worth individuals. It was the fund management arm of Rhone Group which tabled a proposal at midnight on Friday with Liverpool FC, a "distressed" business, as it sees it, and one which should yield a cash return in the medium term.

Some supporters at Liverpool may feel that they do not covet these individuals as new proprietors. Agostinelli is an individual who once described Berlusconi as "a leader who will save the country" and who also once suggested that "the left is a cancer that needs to be eradicated." The spirit of Shankly this is most certainly not.


But if Rhone Group does turn out to be the majority shareholder at Liverpool, don't expect the imprimatur of the two partners to be all over the club. Rhone's investors are looking at Liverpool as "just another business deal", according to one source familiar with the outfit. Their other recent ventures have included financing for the clothes firm Quiksilver, putting money into the toy chain Early Learning Centre, and part-owning the aluminium company Almatis, which Rhone then sold, incidentally, to a former Liverpool suitor, Dubai International Capital.

With a portfolio as diverse as that, Rhone's partners are certainly not going to be willing to tolerate Tom Hicks and George Gillett commanding a controlling stake in the club. One of the mysteries of their proposed investment – the figure varies from £80m to £115 according to who you talk to – is why they would be willing to put so much money in for a 40 per cent share, only to face the prospect of Hicks and Gillett banding together to form a 60 per cent controlling influence. The details of any agreement signed off between Rhone and Liverpool would settle that. It is likely that Hicks and Gillett would have to agree to be sleeping partners and would need assurances of control. The Independent also understands that Agostinelli and Langman would not be seeking active involvement in the running of the club, as the current American incumbents have.

Remoteness need not be a bad outcome. If Christian Purslow, Liverpool's managing director, can resolve the £100m issue, he can set about rescheduling his club's debts over three years on better terms, rather than the sequence of 12-month arrangements which seem to make every June an anxious time at Anfield. There is confidence that if the club can be put on more secure financial footing in this way, then further capital can be secured to build the new Stanley Park stadium which has been the key to the club's financial future for so long. The suggestions are that Rhone Group would buy into that idea.

Needless to say, Hicks and Gillett have not expressed any great delight about Rhone Group, though the plight the club are now in does not give them room for manoeuvre with RBS. The future of the club is in the hands of Purslow, whom RBS see as the individual to deliver back some of the money they are owed.

It all points to a resolution of this stormy period in the club's history by the time the season is out. Though there are no other new prospective partners at the table, there is a belief at the club and apparently RBS too that Rhone might flush out interest from some of the other interested parties from Dubai and Saudi Arabia to India and all points in between who have melted into the background as quickly as they have surfaced. RBS's lack of anxiety about the repayment dates for the £100m it has asked Purslow to secure points to a feeling from the bankers' perspective that Rhone Group could be a force for the good, if no other buyers materialise.

The three-week deadline which Rhone have imposed on Liverpool means that April will be a critical month. Some observers close to the process of securing new investment believe that other bidders are waiting to see if Liverpool struggle towards a top four berth, an outcome which will make the club's financial position even more problematic and potentially force the price down. On the field, prepare for Liverpool v Manchester United, Sunderland and Fulham in that Premier League order. Off the field, prepare for something considerably more momentous.

 

[Insignificance]

100 mill is not a problematic amount to cough up for potential investors. It is the sight of no return on that money until spent another 3-400 mill pound on a new stadium that is the hick up here. And that burden will not be lighter of having Hicks and Gillett as co-partners unwilling to throw in any money of their own....

I am very very very uncomfortable with this NY deal. I dont want americans and I dont want anyone that have done business with those two idiots before to be involved. And if the rumour that these guys were involved with Corintians are true, god help us all!

 

[Rosco]

[quote author=themn link=topic=39372.msg1071885#msg1071885 date=1268904422]

One of the mysteries of their proposed investment – the figure varies from £80m to £115 according to who you talk to – is why they would be willing to put so much money in for a 40 per cent share, only to face the prospect of Hicks and Gillett banding together to form a 60 per cent controlling influence. The details of any agreement signed off between Rhone and Liverpool would settle that. It is likely that Hicks and Gillett would have to agree to be sleeping partners and would need assurances of control. The Independent also understands that Agostinelli and Langman would not be seeking active involvement in the running of the club, as the current American incumbents have.

[/quote]

Does anyone really believe there is a mystery as to why they would do this ?

 

[M_B]

A bit of uncomfortable reading...........

http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2010/03/17/revealed-the-motives-driving-rhones-non-billionaire-liverpool-bidders/

The men behind the private equity firm bidding for a stake in Liverpool are not billionaires, and are not intending to invest their own fortunes, such as they are, in the deal, sportingintelligence can reveal.

The Rhone Group, an international company with offices in New York, London, Paris and Milan, tabled a bid at the weekend for somewhere* between £100m and £118.5m for an initial 40 per cent stake in Liverpool.

The firm was founded in 1997 by two US bankers, Robert Agostinelli and Steven Langman, and it has been widely – and erroneously – reported that they are billionaires with £3bn to spend who will pour massive resources into Liverpool if their investment plan comes to fruition. That is untrue.

As the Spirit of Shankly fans’ group has today written to Liverpool’s managing director, Christian Purslow, asking for clarification of Rhone’s “bidâ€, sportingintelligence can reveal:

* Agostinelli and Langman are “far from billionairesâ€, and neither will invest “anything, or anything significant†from their own funds into Liverpool.

* The London arm of the Rhone Group (Rhone Group LLP) had an annual turnover in its most recent accounts of just £5.9m. While the firm “manages†total funds of £3bn globally, the emphasis is on “manages.†Rhone doesn’t “own†this money; it takes fees from moving its clients’ cash between investments.

* Rhone’s offer for a stake in Liverpool has been made on behalf of a group of an as-yet unnamed investors who have other funds under management by Rhone in a variety of other ventures.

* These are “disinterested†parties who believe that injecting their cash into Liverpool now, when it is a “distressed†business, will lead to a cash profit in the medium term. In other words, they want to invest when Liverpool is vulnerable, help to stabilise the finances and create an environment in which commercial lenders will fund the new stadium, then get out at a profit. Nobody disputes Liverpool’s massive potential as a money-making machine when the new stadium is built. Getting there is the hard part, and Rhone’s executives see an upside in helping.

* Rhone’s investors are looking at Liverpool as “just another business dealâ€. Rhone’s other recent investments have included, for example, financing for the clothes firm Quiksilver, putting money into the toy chain Early Learning Centre, and part-owning the aluminium company Almatis, which Rhone then sold, incidentally, to a former Liverpool suitor, Dubai International Capital.

* Rhone’s offer is understood to be contingent on taking a “controlling†interest, stipulated contractually, even it takes less than a 51 per cent stake. “Leaving Hicks and Gillett with 60 per cent, or rather 60 per cent of voting rights, makes no sense†one source says.

* Rhone are understood to acknowledge privately that their offer will be unattractive to Hicks and Gillett because it offers them no cash, just a dilution of their shareholding. Equally, they know it is the only concrete offer Purslow has to date. As sportingintelligence has already reported, Liverpool’s co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett think Rhone’s offer is too low. Sportingintelligence understands that Gillett at least is willing to walk away from Liverpool altogether now, but only at the right price.

* The Rhone Group believes Hicks and Gillett are under more urgent imminent pressure to repay a chunk of Liverpool’s £237m debts to RBS than is widely believed. RBS has demanded that £100m be repaid no later than July. Some of that is actually due sooner, Rhone believes, although it is generally acknowledged RBS would rather allow some leeway than seize control of Liverpool.

* Agostinelli, whose ex-wife Mathilde is a senior executive at Prada, is an acquaintance of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, although only Mathidle, now remarried, and not Agostinelli, went to Sarkozy’s wedding to Carla Bruni. Much has been made of Agostinelli’s other “links†to politicians, but while both he and Langman have track records of political donations to Republicans, including to John McCain, it is not thought he is especially close to fellow long-term Republican Hicks.

.

A spokesman for the SoS group said today: “There is genuine concern amongst fans, that whilst we need this new investment, it may not be for the greater good of the football club. Tom Hicks and George Gillett made all the right noises and said all the right things when they took over and look how that has turned out. Fans have learnt from the past, and any new investors will come under closer scrutiny from those who genuinely care about the football club. We don’t want to be jumping from the frying pan, into the fire.

“We are left wondering just what the Rhone group’s intentions would be. In the desperation for the club’s management to reduce the debt, we cannot do this without any consideration to what it might mean to the future of our football club. A quick look into Rhone’s previous dealings leaves fans worried at just what they want from LFC, with a worry that it would be a chance for them to make a quick profit – a profit that would be extracted from the club, reducing the opportnity to invest on the pitch. Until fans have their issues listened to and questions answered, any investment will be treated with scepticism and a great deal of trepidation.â€

 

[Insignificance]

[quote author=Rosco link=topic=39372.msg1071893#msg1071893 date=1268905013]
[quote author=themn link=topic=39372.msg1071885#msg1071885 date=1268904422]

One of the mysteries of their proposed investment – the figure varies from £80m to £115 according to who you talk to – is why they would be willing to put so much money in for a 40 per cent share, only to face the prospect of Hicks and Gillett banding together to form a 60 per cent controlling influence. The details of any agreement signed off between Rhone and Liverpool would settle that. It is likely that Hicks and Gillett would have to agree to be sleeping partners and would need assurances of control. The Independent also understands that Agostinelli and Langman would not be seeking active involvement in the running of the club, as the current American incumbents have.

[/quote]

Does anyone really believe there is a mystery as to why they would do this ?
[/quote]

To secure a 40% stake would leave you voulnerable if the climate between the two other 30% ownersw would secure them the majority. However they should feel comfortable that they are not facing an united 60% on the other side of the table.

 

[TheBunnyman]

I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...

 

[spider-Neil]

[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072027#msg1072027 date=1268919164]
I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...
[/quote]

I think this will put an end to having a suger daddy pouring money into the club.

hicks, gillette and rhone aren't going to put in any money from their own pockets it will all come from loans and any potential future investions will be put off by the huge fee all three will want to sell the club.

we are stuck with them.

 

[TheBunnyman]

[quote author=spider-neil link=topic=39372.msg1072032#msg1072032 date=1268919380]
[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072027#msg1072027 date=1268919164]
I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...
[/quote]

I think this will put an end to having a suger daddy pouring money into the club.

hicks, gillette and rhone aren't going to put in any money from their own pockets it will all come from loans and any potential future investions will be put off by the huge fee all three will want to sell the club.

we are stuck with them.
[/quote]

Huge fee? Rhone are getting 40% of the club for £100m.

Whatever happened to the Share Liverpool group? Shouldn't they be putting in a bid right about now?

 

[Insignificance]

[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072036#msg1072036 date=1268919549]
[quote author=spider-neil link=topic=39372.msg1072032#msg1072032 date=1268919380]
[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072027#msg1072027 date=1268919164]
I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...
[/quote]

I think this will put an end to having a suger daddy pouring money into the club.

hicks, gillette and rhone aren't going to put in any money from their own pockets it will all come from loans and any potential future investions will be put off by the huge fee all three will want to sell the club.

we are stuck with them.
[/quote]

Huge fee? Rhone are getting 40% of the club for £100m.

Whatever happened to the Share Liverpool group? Shouldn't they be putting in a bid right about now?

[/quote]

I think some Rhone group bought their customer base recently for 1£ and a can of Fosters.

 

[DHSC]

My guess is that Rhone is actually in 'cahoots' with Hicks and with his share in Liverpool. will own 70% of the club. Ultimate aim is to fuck Gillette off.

 

[Hansern]

Hopefully another offer will be on the table before april 5th.

I'm getting a bad feeling about Rhone group..

 

[Rosco]

[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072036#msg1072036 date=1268919549]
[quote author=spider-neil link=topic=39372.msg1072032#msg1072032 date=1268919380]
[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072027#msg1072027 date=1268919164]
I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...
[/quote]

I think this will put an end to having a suger daddy pouring money into the club.

hicks, gillette and rhone aren't going to put in any money from their own pockets it will all come from loans and any potential future investions will be put off by the huge fee all three will want to sell the club.

we are stuck with them.
[/quote]

Huge fee? Rhone are getting 40% of the club for £100m.

Whatever happened to the Share Liverpool group? Shouldn't they be putting in a bid right about now?

[/quote]

They've obviously failed to get any real money together

 

[refugee]

[quote author=Rosco link=topic=39372.msg1072150#msg1072150 date=1268928872]
[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072036#msg1072036 date=1268919549]
[quote author=spider-neil link=topic=39372.msg1072032#msg1072032 date=1268919380]
[quote author=TheBunnyman link=topic=39372.msg1072027#msg1072027 date=1268919164]
I've got a REALLY bad feeling about this...
[/quote]

I think this will put an end to having a suger daddy pouring money into the club.

hicks, gillette and rhone aren't going to put in any money from their own pockets it will all come from loans and any potential future investions will be put off by the huge fee all three will want to sell the club.

we are stuck with them.
[/quote]

Huge fee? Rhone are getting 40% of the club for £100m.

Whatever happened to the Share Liverpool group? Shouldn't they be putting in a bid right about now?

[/quote]

They've obviously failed to get any real money together
[/quote]

The xenophobia they exhibited when they first started did them no favours, I suspect they would have had more supporters if they had opened up shares to everyone instead of just those in the England. The pricing of a single share was also very high.