henry cheng | Page 2 | Vital Football

henry cheng

To Hampton - I don't understand your comment.

'Underwriting' is the process by which investment bankers raise investment capital from investors on behalf of corporations and governments that are issuing either equity or debt securities.

Underwriting is accepting liability for any losses made and to guarantee payment of said losses, he would be a brave man to do that!
 
There's no mention about investing (other than purchase cost) which there should be, as a matter of regulation, because of its possible effect upon all shareholders and share price.

I do seem to remember that one of the statement’s from IEC made direct reference to investment in the first team being one of their main and immediate priorities.
 
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There's no mention about investing (other than purchase cost) which there should be, as a matter of regulation, because of its possible effect upon all shareholders and share price.

Any future investment ie spending is operational policy, part of the general day to day running of the company and it is the decision of the board of directors and management how they see fit run the business, they have no requirement whatsoever to tell the shareholders what future spending or budgets will be, the only legal requirements are ones that could effect share price as in any acquisition or disposal. If the board of directors get things wrong by poor spending they can be removed at the company AGM.

Public limited companies regularly purchase businesses and are not sure of the exact details of how they will run that business, although the general direction they wish to take is usually part of how they run their existing business.

IEC are not an institutional investment prospect, no fund managers will be directing pension or insurance companies to invest in it, the company looks like a vehicle for a group of business people to use as an when needed, sometimes called a shell company, although IEC is not directly a shell company it has links to a number of them, if it makes profit seems to be not a real concern to its owners.
 
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Underwriting is accepting liability for any losses made and to guarantee payment of said losses, he would be a brave man to do that!
He would indeed and we would make big losses should significant investment be made in our team due to our lack of income/generated revenue. But Henry Cheng is a very rich man who could cover a loss of say 20 million quid, through the spare change in his right pocket..
 
To clarify - As stated by others here IEC are a shell with little / no funds hence the sign off delay / concerns. Rightly so. It appears that the Chengs either directly or from an associate company are underwriting / PG ing future cash flow. Not a bean counter but seems reasonable to me !
 
No one buys a Championship club to make money. The only way to get any sort of return is to be promoted.....which in itself costs a small fortune.

I can only imagine a couple of scenarios for someone not associated with Latics or the town to buy us. Either it’s someone buying us for entertainment and the kudos of owning an English club. Or the club is being used to launch a brand of some sort. Not unlike Whelan, first with the established JJB, then launching DW Sports.

From what we understand multiple consortiums have tried to buy us in recent years. All turned down as they where considered unsuitable. Gary Cook has a track record in the sports entertainment world and is a personal friend of the Whelan family. You have to imagine there is trust on both sides to find the right buyer. The one thing we can’t accuse them of is making a quick sale!
 
At the very start Nixon said it was K8 and the Chengs but then when the name of the buyer was revealed to be IEC he said it was still the same people behind it. I thought that info looked to be incorrect as we found out Cheng sold his IEC shares but now it's looking like he may have known more than we realised.

My wonder was with the rumours that the FA were getting a bit suspicious about foreign betting companies potentially buying football clubs (for obvious reasons) did it become impossible for Cheng to buy us via K8 as maybe originally planned - so he had to effectively set up enough legal degrees of seperation between business interests to do the deal. I'm not suggesting that he is trying to trick the FA or do anything illegal but that there may be certain rules that wouldnt allow K8 or it's owners directly taking us over but a seperate entity that isn't directly owned by Cheng but has ties to him could be permissible. Or with the rumours that there is now a bit of a crackdown on money coming out of China to invest in football is this even some way of going round the houses to allow Cheng to buy in and avoid the issues the Villa chairman came accross recently?

It's pure speculation on my part but my guess is that there is almost certainly a technical / legal reason we are being bought via IEC rather than one of the people / companies behind them directly.

Something like that would certainly explain why the deal is taking so long. This take over is like a 'who done it' mystery novel or something!
 
Tell you one thing, when the deal is complete, it’s going to be the most interesting/exciting/important/nerve wracking press conference of this football club’s history. I’m sure many remember Dave Whelan’s first press conference. A man oozing with confidence who instilled belief within the club. I hope the new person or persons contain the same persona.
 
I can only imagine a couple of scenarios ....


I can imagine several more such as iEC wanting to become a significant player in the global sports world but recognising that they know nothing about it so buying a club on the cheap, getting some hands on experience for a couple of years then dumping them and getting properly involved with a "real" club.
Just imagining obviously, this couldn't possibly happen.
 
I can imagine several more such as iEC wanting to become a significant player in the global sports world but recognising that they know nothing about it so buying a club on the cheap, getting some hands on experience for a couple of years then dumping them and getting properly involved with a "real" club.
Just imagining obviously, this couldn't possibly happen.

I can't see why they would bother doing that - if they already had us, they had the club set up how they wanted, they had already pumped in loads of money and had the cash ready to buy into buying a bigger only for the need to invest further - why go to the extra expense, time and effort of doing another take over when they could use us as the vehicle to take them to the Prem - it would end up drastically cheaper and easier to work with what they had to make us a Prem club rather than try and sell us off and then negotiate a deal to buy another club.

Once you are in the Prem the small revenue streams we currently have from our small crowd mean a lot less as the vast majority of most clubs income (outside the big 6 or 7) will come from being in the Premier League either directly in tv money or the sponsoship opportunities, far eastern market interset that it generates.

A good example of this is if ourselves Swansea, West Brom, Wolves, are all in the Prem our revenue streams would likely be quite similar as the gate reciepts that currently seperate us becomes a small piece of overall revenue yet look at the difference in prices agreed for the sales of the 2 clubs in the Prem vs the 2 outside of it.

West Brom 200m
Swansea 110m
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Wolves 45m
Wigan 15-20m

If you were an investor and you had 200m to burn you could spend 200m up front to get West Brom who were by no means a big brand overseas or guarenteed Prem survival. Or you could get little Wigan for about 10% of that initial cost and then even if you spent unpresidented levels at this level say 50-60m to buy promotion (banking on doing it before FFP kicked in after 3 years). You'd have us up to the Prem League money making promise land for about a third of the cost of just buying a bottom half current Prem club.

I'm not suggesting that they will go down that route, but i don't think for a split second that we would be a stepping stone to a bigger club for the simple reason that the clubs that have a real global brand value worth having (Liverpool, United, City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs) are not going to be available. If The Chengs had the desire and finances to go and get one of them they wouldn't even be considering messing about with us as a practice run as controlling one of those clubs compared to us will be so different. While the rest of the clubs in this country are not really hugely different in terms of revenue potential when they are in the Prem and don't have particulary big brand recognition overseas to make them massively better options if you already owned one yourself. So to a large degree for what they need - a football club, playing in the Premier league to make into a cash cow on the back of the tv exposure - we can fit that purpose as well as most other clubs if they are willing to invest enough to get us to the Prem.
 
The deal announced today for Arsenal values the company at £1.9 billion, looking at it from a purchasers point of view c.£20 mill to buy us, couple of hundred mill investment would probably give equal exposure on a world stage to the owners as all the big clubs at a fraction of the cost, I would be more worried being Stan Kronkie spending a further £600 mill for 30% of the available shares than being a Chinese group spending 20 mill on us.
 
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Sorry I didn't mean Kings was bollocks lol ooops

I didn't think that you did mean Kings was bollocks Zakky, I assumed you meant my imagined scenario was bollocks.

Here's another scenario, the Chinese, deeply offended by Whelans comments from a few years ago, understand that revenge is a dish best served cold and hatch a scheme to buy WAFC with the intent of asset-stripping it to the bare bones and driving it to extinction, whilst cackling evily as they disappear over the horizon. (Charles, I'm not serious).
 
I didn't think that you did mean Kings was bollocks Zakky, I assumed you meant my imagined scenario was bollocks.

Here's another scenario, the Chinese, deeply offended by Whelans comments from a few years ago, understand that revenge is a dish best served cold and hatch a scheme to buy WAFC with the intent of asset-stripping it to the bare bones and driving it to extinction, whilst cackling evily as they disappear over the horizon. (Charles, I'm not serious).

HOLY S---! It all makes sense now! :eek:
 
According to the PWU Podcast it was Cheng and they where sat inside having photos taken with Latics scarves on.