Chelsea faces the possibility of losing ground: Adam Clery of FourFourTwo breaks down the circumstances here.
Chelsea’s situation appears to be improving, but a significant report published in the Guardian today indicates that they could lose valuable points.
First and foremost, it’s crucial to clarify that the newspaper isn’t pulling a practical joke on the football team. It’s actually a component of Cyprus Confidential, a massive international investigation. Parts of the 3.6 million offshore company records that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists discovered have been made available to over a dozen news organizations worldwide.
One of the many, many, many revelations from this has been the possibility that Roman Abramovic, the former owner of Chelsea, was funding the team in a way that not only disregarded sustainability and profitability regulations, but also made a mockery of them.
The good news for Chelsea supporters is that an investigation into all of this will now occur, and if it turns out that the team violated these rules to the degree that it appears they did, there will almost certainly be a deduction of points.
What then have they allegedly done? And did they really accomplish that?
Therefore, a brief history lesson for those under 20: In 2003, Roman Abramovich paid £140 million to acquire Chelsea, a sum of money that was simply unconscionable. People forget, but at the time, nothing like this had ever occurred on such a large scale. Petit and Gallas were obtained in one window, while Crespo, Veron, Duff, Makelele, Parker, Cole, Duff, Bridge, Glen Johnson, and Mutu were obtained in the subsequent one. It was almost instantaneous, and it was crazy.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it impossible for him to maintain ownership due to financial sanctions imposed by the UK, he eventually sold up last year. However, almost immediately after his departure, a number of revelations regarding his sale have surfaced.
Actually, the Premier League was already looking into their finances. voluntary disclosure from 2012 to 2019 by Todd Bohelly and associates that they had discovered “incomplete financial information.” I’m going to sound very opinionated here, but I don’t see why you would expose yourself in that way unless you were planning to pull a “see, we’ve been very cooperative, we’re not the bad guys” move later on.
But that is all history now. This news is fresh. or simply “news,” as it is known.
Federico Pastorello, an Italian football agent, and Conibair Holdings, a tax haven based in the British Virgin Islands, inked a deal in July 2017. The £10 million payment was made to him for a 75% share in Excellence Investment Fund (EIF), a nondescript financial company based in the United States.
What matters is that Roman Abramovic is the owner of Conibair Holdings. Additionally, Pastorello, the agent, is rumored to have had close ties to Antonio Conte, the Chelsea manager at the time. You might wonder, though, what’s wrong with that. On the same day that Chelsea received the £10 million payment, they revealed that Conte had agreed to a new contract worth £9.6 million annually.
Eden Hazard is another. He was unquestionably one of Chelsea’s greatest players ever, leading them to the Premier League championship that secured Conte a lucrative new contract. But when he got to the team, he was reportedly owed a substantial fee by his agent John Bico-Penaque, on top of the roughly £30 million they had paid Lille for him. At the time, he was rumored to want between £5 and £6 million.
Eight months after Hazard’s arrival, in March 2013, records indicate that a Virgin Islands-based company owned by Abramovic made a payment of approximately £6 million to Gulf Value FZE, a Dubai-based company. formally for “consultancy and advisory services pertaining to sport research and consulting.”
Who signed that contract on behalf of them? Someone? The Bico-Penaque John. It’s possible that he did offer “advisory services related to sports research and consultancy” through a financial company based in Dubai, which has a large clientele that includes Leiston Holdings. Tax-haven investment firms are merely giddy with excitement when they receive advice on sports-related matters. Might be?
Alternatively, it’s possible that they used these holding companies to backchannel the funds needed to pay Hazard’s agent in order to a) avoid paying any taxes on it and b) avoid having to disclose it to the football authorities and risk having it violate profitability and sustainability regulations. Since I’m not a doctor, I’m not sure.
This also contains a ton of other stuff. £7 million in payments made to the brothers Lemic. reputedly important players in the transfer of Arjen Robben, Branislav Ivanovic, Nemanja Matic, and double-winning coach Carlo Ancelotti to the team were well-known Abramocivc associates and close friends. In this way, it never ends.
Why then is this an issue? Financially speaking, football is arguably the most corrupt industry on Earth, and everyone is somehow “at it” in this regard, right? Okay, I see. But regulations still apply. Additionally, big clubs break the big rules—big time. Almost always, there is a significant response.
And that quote from the Guardian article is this one. The part that should make Chelsea supporters a little uneasy.
Kieran Maguire, a football finance expert who literally wrote The Price of Football, states that, “If there is proof that the club has used third-party transactions to circumvent the profitability and sustainability rules then sanctions would be either financial or a points deduction. The latter is more likely as any commission investigating a club’s circumstances will want to put out a deterrent that dissuades others from repeating such behaviour.”
if evidence of the club’s use of third-party transactions exists. All the other people and companies that I have listed here, who have been making payments to Chelsea-related individuals either directly or indirectly, are considered third parties. They are not associated with the club merely because they are owned by Abramocivh. It is against the law for them to spend their personal funds on behalf of a football team.
For evident legal reasons, we are unable to confirm whether or not that is the case at this time. The governing bodies of the game will have to look into that and make a determination. All I can say is that this report doesn’t seem good from what I’ve read.