Is Mr Usmanov about to takeover Arsenal? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does
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By Tony Attwood
Predictions of Arsenal’s imminent downfall are always interesting, and 2010 gave us quite a few of them. The most amusing one, and the one that was talked about the most I guess, was the complete failure of the season ticket sales, and a half empty Ems for this season.
That story started a year ago, with the rumour that if you wanted a season ticket you could just phone up and get one. Then it went on to the summer with people jumping from position 50,000 on the waiting list to being able to get a ticket straight off.
The stadium is however sold out all the time, the waiting list is still 10 years, and I suspect Arsenal v Ipswich will sell out too – without any season tickets in place (its excluded from the Gold package).
We have also had quite a bit about shareholders taking over the club with comments such as, “There’s no multiple ownership at Arsenal – Usmanov will buy the lot, and we’ll be just like Man IOU.”
And it is true. Alisher Usmanov has been trying to buy shares to catch up with Stan Kronke and then… well then what? I am not quite sure that anything follows from that.
Bloomberg, the financial thingy that knows a lot about money quoted Mr Usmanov as saying that “Today, we have 27%; our objective is to bring that up to a blocking stake of 29.9%,”
As I said, Mr Usmanov has been buying, and his known willingness to buy has taken the price of Arsenal shares even higher than the price they were at before. In fact this year shares are 20% or more higher that last Christmas. But despite his offer to buy and his obvious access to the money, Mr Usmanov has still not got anywhere near the 29.9% he says he wants. According to the record book he has grown his share portfolio by under one tenth of one percent since he started trying to buy – even when offering way over the odds. Which means he is stuck not even on 27% but actually on 26.9%.
However here’s the oddity. The shares of the Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith which are just under 16% of the show, are still on sale – and no one wants to buy. The sale of those shares was another great story that the AAA circulated for a while. Lady Nina’s shares were going to be bought by someone from China, and then Aliko Dangote of Nigeria, but after a while he said, “not me mate”, and it all went quiet again. As far as I know, no one has bought any of the shares.
We didn’t actually get told that an Al Qaeda war-lord was going for the shares, but that rumour is probably next on the list. Come to think of it, we could start the story and see if the AAA pick it up.
The point is still the point I tried to make at the time. With all those shares you get nothing. No dividend, no seat on the board, not even a silver membership. What’s the point? In fact, having now sat in the director’s section of the stand (see the tiny picture of me in the final shot of the Arsenal Til I Die event) I’ve got further up the hierarchy than whoever does buy the shares.
Stan Kroenke (now an executive director of the club) still has 29.999999% or something like that. Danny Fiszman, has 16% stake and seems never to want to sell anything to Mr Usmanov. According to the Guardian he is “believed to be behind moves that have frustrated Usmanov’s attempts to gain boardroom representation.”
So you are asking, (if not currently frozen to death – if you are in western Europe that is) why does Mr Usmanov not buy the Bracewell-Smith bundle of goodiese and get 43% of the company?
Because he would then have to bid for all the shares. No problem there, except that it is 99.999999999999% certain that he would not get the 50.01% he needs. At that point he then has to go back down to the 29.9% stake – which means he is then left with all the Bracewell Smith shares to get rid of.
So at this point he will have lost a few million pounds in the cost of the bidding, and have £100m worth of shares that he is not allowed to keep. The chances are he would not be able to sell them (if there was someone wanting them they would be buying them from Lady N), so what he then has is an investment of £100m with no value, no income and no nothing, and which he can only redeem by reducing the price of the shares for a sale.
That would not only lose him money in itself, but would instantly devalue all the other shares he holds, and which he has been paying a premium price for.
It is in effect a non-starter of a story. Ownership of Arsenal stays where it is.