Lest we forget, we’re still a football club. We won an important match away on the Lancashire coast yesterday against Blackpool. Our performance wasn’t stellar but it was enough to get us the three points We face a lot of critical matches in the coming weeks in which we simply have to take all three points if we’re to give ourselves any chance of winning the League.
Frankly, we could have done without the distraction of Stan Kroenke’s takeover bid at the moment. It is what it is however. The non-executive members of the Arsenal board – Sir Chips Keswick, Ken Friar, Lord Harris of Peckham, Danny Fiszman and chairman Peter Hill-Wood are all recommending the bid to existing shareholders, all of whom with the exception of Danny Fiszman will be selling outright. There is an irrevocable obligation to buy Danny Fiszman’s shares after his death. These are now owned by a trust recently established by Fiszman who is gravely ill with cancer. Feffectivly Silent Stan now owns 62% of the club.
The City Takeover Code requires him to make an offer for all the remaining shares including those of Alisher Usmanov’s Red & White Holdings. Whether Usmanov will sell at the offer price of £11,750 a share is unclear. He’d make a small (for him) profit of £40 million or so if he did. If Usmanov sells then Kroenke will reach the ninety percent level he would require to de-list the shares from public trading.
I understand that Kroenke will be borrowing the money from Bank of America to fund his take-over. It’s crucial to Arsenal that that debt never ends up on the club’s books. Just look what’s happened at Manchester United where the Glazer family has used the club as its own personal cash dispenser siphoning hundreds of millions out of the club in interest, finance charges and personal loans and fees.
We’ve got enough debt with the mortgage on the Emirates. We can’t afford to have more debt loaded on nor pay shareholder dividends which is just another way of draining out cash from the club. We haven’t paid a dividend since the early 1970s and that was very small – almost a token.
I also want to know if Kroenke will maintain his support for Arsenal Fanshare and a continued role for supporters in club ownership and governance. Having just completed the full takeover of the National Football League’s St Louis Rams and still having a big say in the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League and the Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association, still owning the Pepsi Centre in Denver in which they latter two play and the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer along with their ground Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, and living in Missouri, over four thousand miles from London, you’d have thought that that was enough for most people, especially as he has a large commercial property development business too.
How much of his attention he will give to Arsenal is a question to which I want an answer. I’m unclear what his motivation for buying our club is. He has more money (or at least more realisable assets which he can turn into cash quickly) than anybody could spend if they lived to be a thousand years old. He is close to the age where most people would be thinking of putting their feet up and relaxing. He’ll be 64 in July. There’s no reason he won’t live another 25-30 years with the money he has to pay for cutting edge medical treatment though.
I’ll never get why rich people want more and more. That’s not a criticism. Just a statement that I’m happy if I have enough money to pay the bills and indulge in my passions for Arsenal and travel to my beloved South America. I shan’t be accepting Stan Kroenke’s offer personally, unless and until he exercises his rights to buy compulsorily all the shares which he effectively will when and if he owns ninety percent of them.
I’d stand to make a clear profit of nearly £10,000 if I did, just below the level at which the eighteen percent Capital Gains Tax kicks in at £10,600. I’m simply not interested though. I bought my one Arsenal share at £1,900 not as investment but to own part of the club I love with such passion. I hope a large a large number of Arsenal shareholders will join me in not selling. I think that it’s crucial that there continue to be a large and growing number of supporter-shareholders both personally and through Arsenal Fanshare of which I’m also a subscribing member.
In the meanwhile there are some serious questions that Stan Kroenke needs to answer.
Keep the faith!
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