The Athletic have just published an article about 'wrong un' football club owners.
I do not have a subscription, anyone got a subscription on here.
Also Chorley FC have been taken over by a chap/company with a series of interesting iterations of their corporate structure.
Possibly a concern for the club
This?
In the second of our series about the men who want to buy English football clubs, we tell the story of Dozy Mmobuosi, whose Tingo group of companies promised to bring European football to Sheffield United. It was some tale. But none of it was ever going to happen.
This is part of a five-part series about prospective investors and what their interest in English football says about their ambitions and the game itself.
Part one was on Chris Kirchner, who came close to taking over Derby County and was then found guilty of fraud and money laundering.
In the 1990 gangster classic Goodfellas, the protagonist Henry Hill goes for the ultimate flex on his first date with future wife Karen by leading her through the kitchen of the coolest club in New York, skipping a queue outside, to a front-row table that has just been laid for them.
It is a scene that encapsulates the movie — Henry and his friends don’t wait in line — and it ends with a question that underlines the point.
“What do you do?” asks Karen.
It is a question I asked Dozy Mmobuosi last year after I had been led through the basement of The Dorchester hotel to sit across from him at the Chef’s Table — “the best seat in the house”, a private dining room separated from the kitchen by a glass wall that can be transparent so you can watch your meal being made, or opaque so that nobody can see who you have invited.
I had been summoned to London’s Mayfair for a clear-the-air meeting with the 45-year-old after his bid for Sheffield United, then of the Championship, now in the Premier League.
On February 2, 2023, The Times reported the “Nigerian technology billionaire” was “close” to buying the Yorkshire club for £90million (now $115million). The newspaper said Mmobuosi’s company Tingo Mobile had been valued at $7.6billion and the deal was subject to Mmobuosi passing the EFL’s owners’ and directors’ test but “so far no problems have arisen”.
The story was followed up by several British and international outlets, who noted Mmobuosi had just graced the cover of GQ Africa and launched the Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation at a ball held at The Dorchester.
Within 48 hours, dozens of stories had been published with new pieces of information and photographs lifted from Mmobuosi’s social media accounts and Tingo’s website. There were snaps of Mmobuosi looking dashing by a fireplace, one with his arm around the British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua, several of him in black tie with the Nigerian presidential candidate Peter Obi and the Senegalese-American singer/businessman Akon, and one in more casual attire at his desk in front of a laptop.
According to the clippings, as well as owning Tingo Mobile, he had just launched an online marketplace called Tingo Foods, was building Nigeria’s largest food-processing plant, had opened a business school and started a mobile cancer-screening service in Nigeria. Oh, and he was expanding into Ghana, Malawi and the United Arab Emirates. The Sheffield United takeover was “imminent” and his personal fortune was “north of £5billion”.
In fact, he was so confident of taking over at Sheffield United, that he told reporters he had already paid a non-refundable deposit of almost £10million to the club’s Saudi owner Prince Abdullah. For a club that had been struggling to pay basic bills and transfer instalments, Mmobuosi’s millions were a lifeline.
Four days after The Times scoop, The Athletic reported that Tingo Airlines — Mmobuosi’s aviation business — had not got off the ground. This was despite him claiming you could “fly with Tingo Airlines today” from London to Nigeria in November 2020 and the UK-registered company having £1billion in share capital.
Further examination of these claims revealed that the company’s business address — a rented flat near Luton — had been removed from the website of Companies House, the UK’s registrar of companies, because it was “invalid or ineffective and was forged”. Furthermore, Tingo Airlines was facing an active proposal to be struck off because it was late with basic paperwork.
There was also no evidence that Tingo had the UK Air Operator’s Certificate or it had been “in the process of obtaining” any aircraft. The pictures of planes on the company website, which was riddled with missing links, were photoshopped versions of stock pictures of an Airbus A321. Whoever added the Tingo livery also added some extra windows and removed a door.
Mmobuosi responded with a flurry of media activity, including long interviews with CNN and the former England and Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand on his YouTube channel FIVE. The confusion with the airline was the pandemic’s fault, apparently.
The club, meanwhile, continued to say absolutely nothing about Mmobuosi or the takeover, which they thought had been the PR strategy agreed with his team. Some of his team were a bit confused by the media blitz, too, but the game was afoot.
Before meeting him at The Dorchester, I was warned Mmobuosi was “upset” about The Athletic’s coverage of his takeover attempt, so I should expect a frosty reception. And that is what I got, but not from the self-styled tech billionaire wearing a baseball cap from the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.
The frostiness came from the gentleman sitting next to him, a British football agent who tried to impress upon me the importance of getting on the “right side of this story”. In not very subtle terms, I was warned our coverage of Mmobuosi’s attempt to become English football’s first black owner might be perceived as racist.
I tell this story to highlight some of the people Mmobuosi fooled and why so many of them wanted to believe him. And that is why I am not naming the agent — he is embarrassed enough.
Because the trail of unpaid bills and salaries Mmobuosi has left behind in the UK will make it even harder for any legitimate African entrepreneur who follows him in trying to buy an English football club.
Seven weeks after our meeting, Mmobuosi issued a statement to deny that his Sheffield United bid was failing. By then, it had already failed.
By early June, his business empire was revealed to be an illusion, with a damning report saying the Tingo group was “a worthless and brazen fraud”. As 2023 ticked over into 2024, Mmobuosi was charged with three counts of fraud by the U.S. Department of Justice and accused of running a global scam of “staggering” scale by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which said Tingo Mobile had less than $50 in a Nigerian bank when Mmobuosi claimed it had $460million. He denies all the charges.
Mmobuosi did answer my question, taking nearly two hours to explain how his Tingo group of companies would harness the power of Nigerian farmers to conquer Wall Street, feed the world, cure cancer and bring European football to Bramall Lane.
It was some tale. But none of it was ever going to happen.
In February, Mmobuosi took a trip to the Highlands with the British fashion designer Ozwald Boateng to look at a whisky distillery that was up for sale. They flew north on a private jet with Mmobuosi’s chef and PR team, while a bouncer drove one of Mmobuosi’s rented Rolls-Royces up from London to meet them at the other end.
The Times reported Boateng saying Mmobuosi had “an almost magical quality”. There is no suggestion that Boateng is anything other than another person who was enchanted by the Mmobuosi mirage. Boateng has not responded to The Athletic’s requests for comment.
On that trip to Scotland, the group stopped off for a quick tour of Ardross Castle, the location for the hit BBC TV show The Traitors. Mmobuosi had told the owners he was interested in buying the place.