IEC Changes | Vital Football

IEC Changes

I can't begin to understand the full ramifications. I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the international corporate world... But I'd say it's a looking like Choi is taking the club into his personal ownership rather than having it under the IEC corporate portfolio.

This could indicate a couple of things...

1. The club is a drain on the corporate balance sheet. As such, by taking out out of the corporate group of companies, the losses won't appear on the IEC balance sheet, which will improve their share price, since they can report greater profits.

If this is the case, little will probably change. As a billionaire, Choi is more than rich enough to keep things as they are, so it's just a case of moving assets around to generate the best return.

2. Choi has caught the 'bug' and wants to invest more. He's a billionaire and he can afford it. Without having to report financials to a corporate group, he won't be answerable to shareholders or a board. He gets to spend his own money how he likes, and if he wants to spend it on his new pet football club it's his business and his business alone if he owns the club personally.

This could be either a blessing or a curse. Of course more investment is welcome... More money means better players and manager and one would assume more success on the pitch. With that said, it's also greater liability and if he subsequently got bored and stopped investing, it could leave the club in a very perilous financial position, which is something no-one wants.

There's always an element of risk with ownership of football clubs. You could end up with owners like Srivaddhanaprabha (Leicester) who no-one would dispute are exactly the type of owners you want in charge of your club for a whole host of reasons. On the flip side you could get a fly by night type (Ken Anderson Congress to mind) who will kill your club and walk away.

There's literally nothing we as fans can do about it, so we just keep our fingers crossed that Choi is serious and in it for the long haul.

Personally though, I suspect that is more likely to be reason #1 and we'll see very few changes in the actual running of the club. I've been wrong before though, and all we can do is 'watch this space'.
 
As a billionaire, Choi is more than rich enough '.

Not disagreeing with your post Pon but why do you think he is a billionaire ? I can't find anything online to support this (or to be fair to dispute it either). In fact I can't find anything regarding his net worth either under Dr Stanley Choi or Choi Chiu-fai which (I think) is his full name.
 
Not disagreeing with your post Pon but why do you think he is a billionaire ? I can't find anything online to support this (or to be fair to dispute it either). In fact I can't find anything regarding his net worth either under Dr Stanley Choi or Choi Chiu-fai which (I think) is his full name.
Indeed. IEC have funded this club on a bank loan, they’ve got very little money of their own.

The club will need to make a statement over this. Officially we’re changing ownership although unofficially we aren’t. This is probably all being done to avoid the red tape that comes from Wigan being owned by a company on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Why Choi didn’t just purchase the club outright instead of his company as part of the original takeover I don’t know. Would have saved a lot of time.
 
The current political climate in Hong Kong is very volatile and getting money out of the country is proving really difficult for businesses and private equity firms etc like IEC are finding it tough. Private ownership is a bit of legal loophole, but I doubt the level of investment will significantly increase.

Edit - having read over the document, not all of Neworth Ventures will pass into private hands, but it won't be on IEC's books, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Think this is partially a taxation and financial transfer issue.
 
Not disagreeing with your post Pon but why do you think he is a billionaire ? I can't find anything online to support this (or to be fair to dispute it either). In fact I can't find anything regarding his net worth either under Dr Stanley Choi or Choi Chiu-fai which (I think) is his full name.

Thanks to the wonders of Google, it said he had a net worth of $6.7b... but having double checked, that was Francis Choi. A completely different (and as far as I can tell unrelated) person... Got to love Google :confused:

Having double checked, I also can't find any figures on Stanley Choi, so my belief that he was a billionaire was possibly wrong. Still pretty safe to say he's rich, but as to how rich... Dunno.

Sorry if anyone was misled. Genuine mistake.

I stand by my first assertion though, that this is actually to do with corporate level bookkeeping/asset management rather than anything that will affect the running of the club.

To be honest though, right now we've got much bigger problems as a club than who's name is over the door. I'm not going to worry about this until I see something that makes me think that worrying about this is necessary. I'll stick to worrying about the abject form and dire performances for now :tongue:
 
You don't have to be a legal eagle to know this is dodgy as f**k! Two years from now we'll get busted and all sorts of fines thrown at us, "i've left the club in good hands" yeah right, well done Whelan!
 
Personally, I don't much care what the owners doing with his own money, just so long as it doesn't endanger the future of the club. Hong Kong is now in recession and the riots/protests are still ongoing, so it would be my assumption the owners protecting himself and his interests from any negative knock on from that. So fair play if that's the case. I think It would be wishful thinking to believe he's moving assets in order to pump money into the club though, the days of rich owners ploughing money into clubs like ours has been stopped by FFP (for better or worse).

As long as we don't end up in any way shape or form like Horwich, we'll be fine. Mainly because there's no way we'd be given the support or opportunity to survive like they have ... we'd be buried like Bury if we had any ownership or financial issues.
 
It seems a little odd, especially as we announced a load of new board members recently. Effectively we’ll be back to one main shareholder and means we don’t need to announce everything through the HK stock exchange, especially given our losses affect the viability of iec and it’s balance sheet. Hopefully it should streamline decision making, in theory at least. What we need is an explanation in regards the decision making around this from Royle, though given we’re still awaiting on one in regards why Cook is still with us it may take a while (though this ownership change may explain why he’s not been fired yet)
 
What we need is an explanation in regards the decision making around this from Royle, though given we’re still awaiting on one in regards why Cook is still with us it may take a while (though this ownership change may explain why he’s not been fired yet)

The £1.5m to get rid of Cook may be why he is still with us.
 
You don't have to be a legal eagle to know this is dodgy as f**k! Two years from now we'll get busted and all sorts of fines thrown at us, "i've left the club in good hands" yeah right, well done Whelan!
This is pretty much what Whelan did when he took JJB off the stock exchange. It’s far easier to run a football club as a private business. Rather than running everything past the stock exchange first.

Just one example. If Cook and his staff where sacked that could be a fairly substantial pay-off. They’d possibly need to report such things to the stock exchange ahead of time.

Basically their hands are tied in the everyday running of a football club.
 
As someone has already intimated, and also given the timing, I reckon this move is definitely due to the civil unrest in Hong Kong.
It wouldn't surprise me if China imposes Martial Law there in the near future, and that will see the Hang Seng Stock Exchange crash & burn.