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Dan King - Sport Uncovered
At tomorrow's meeting of the Chelsea Pitch Owners, where
shareholders will be asked to approve Wise's appointment to the
board, there will be no need for his talent for creating
confrontation.
Because, once again, some of Chelsea's most committed fans will
be taking aim at the people who run their club.
They will ask whether the Chelsea hierarchy encouraged the
purchase of shares in CPO by people likely to support the club's
plans to leave Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea strongly deny trying to manipulate the crucial vote at
last year's EGM.
And there would have been nothing illegal in senior Stamford
Bridge figures encouraging friendly faces to buy CPO shares in
order to vote in support of moves to leave SW6.
But some supporters, who have been following the club since long
before Roman Abramovich's revolution began in 2003 and who joined
CPO to protect the club from losing its home, believe something
fishy is going on.
That their opinions and their votes are being diluted by people
loyal to Abramovich and the Chelsea hierarchy.
Why do they think this?
Between October 3, 2011, when Chelsea announced their proposal
to buy back the freehold of Stamford Bridge from CPO, and October
20, when sales of shares were suspended a week before the meeting,
a number of people with apparent links to the Chelsea hierarchy
bought stakes in the company.
SunSport has been unable to find out whether they voted in
favour of the club's proposal at the October 27 meeting.
Of course, these people may have bought shares without any
prompting from anyone at Chelsea and voted 'Yes' because they
genuinely believed it was the best thing for the future of the
club.
Or they may have acted in that way out of loyalty to the Chelsea
hierarchy. They included:
MARK SKIPP. The former SAS man is Abramovich's
head of security and has been involved in protecting the Russian
oligarch since soon after his Chelsea takeover.
But despite being connected to Abramovich, and therefore
Chelsea, for several years, Skipp did not buy his 65 shares in CPO
until October 17.
PAUL HEAGREN. The accountant has been a close
associate of Abramovich for more than a decade and is a director of
a number of Chelsea and/or Abramovich-related companies, some of
which are based at Stamford Bridge.
They include Fordstam, the firm which is the ultimate holding
company for Chelsea FC itself.
He did buy a share in CPO in 2010. But on October 14, 2011, he
bought 99 more to take his holding to 100. You are allowed to own
more but voting rights only go with the first 100.
Heagren's wife, Victoria, snapped up 50 shares on the same
day.
PETER COULTON. Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck is a
partner in the London office of American legal firm Skadden, Arps,
Slate, Meagher and Flom.
So is a man named Peter J Coulton, an Australia-trained
lawyer.
He has not responded to SunSport enquiries. But it is understood
he is the same Peter Coulton who bought 100 CPO shares on October
20.
None of the above responded to questions from SunSport.
And there are also questions about others who bought up
to 100 shares before the crucial meeting, such as a former director
of a Chelsea-related company and a woman who lives in the same
building as a senior Chelsea official. But one other purchase is
particularly interesting. On October 14 an individual bought 25
shares and registered them to a London address.
Publicly available records do not confirm that person as living
there.
But someone who is listed as an inhabitant of the address, and
who co-owns the property according to the UK Land Registry, is a
man named Brandon Scott Buck.
One of Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck's sons is called Brandon.
It has not been possible to establish whether the Brandon Buck
registered at that address is related to Bruce. If so, though, this
raises the intriguing possibility that Brandon Buck encouraged the
purchaser to buy the 25 shares and register them to his
address.
What can be confirmed is that a Brandon Buck works in the London
office of an American firm of architects called Kohn Pedersen Fox,
who have provided advice to Chelsea in the past.
There was no response from KPF's Brandon Buck, their head office
in New York or Chelsea to requests to clarify the situation.
There are a number of other purchasers, whose full identity and
motives remain a mystery.
The key issue is why buy the shares and why then?
CPO was set up in 1993, after Stamford Bridge had been saved
from property developers.
The Chelsea chairman at the time, Ken Bates, agreed the club
would loan CPO £10million to buy the Stamford Bridge freehold in
1997.
The club's proposal to buy it back was based on repaying the
£100 cost price of each share — in other words, there was no
financial gain to be made from buying them before the vote and then
voting to sell them back for the same amount.
To attend the EGM, fans needed to buy just one share for £100 —
not up to 100 at a cost of £10,000. Buying a chunk of shares could
have had only one purpose. To influence the vote one way or the
other.
In the end, the club failed to secure the 75 per cent of votes
they needed when the October 27 meeting turned hostile.
Bruce Buck said afterwards: "We don't know who bought the
shares. I certainly know that one of the leaders of 'Say No CPO'
bought 100 shares during that period because he told me and he
wasn't hiding it.
"During the course of the three weeks, there have been people
who have come up to us at Chelsea and asked 'What can we do to
help?' We said 'Vote in favour if you have shares or want to buy
shares'. We've been pretty relaxed about it."
But other CPO shareholders — Buck himself bought 99 shares back
in April to take his total to 100 — are less relaxed.
To some eyes, the connections between some of those who bought
shares and key figures at Stamford Bridge — and the timing of their
purchases — look like more than simply coincidence.
It was revealed that earlier in the year Bruce Buck had become
so frustrated with a CPO shareholder and critic called Paul Todd
that he had asked another supporter to get Todd 'under control' and
ensure he was kept 'on the sidelines'. A Chelsea statement said
that the comments, made in voice messages, were just a reflection
of Buck's frustration at being unable to get hold of Todd to
talk.
Many believe no new shares should have been issued after Chelsea
had announced their buy-back proposal.
And it looks bad that the CPO board allowed many more shares to
be sold after the announcement than they should.
A total of 1,686 of the 2,517 shares bought between October 3
and the suspension of trading on October 20 should
NOT have been issued because of a restriction
agreed by CPO directors themselves a year before.
New CPO board chairman Steve Frankham says this was an oversight
— rather than a conspiracy — and that lawyers have advised the
board the shares do not have to be cancelled.
But at tomorrow's Annual General Meeting, one of the motions is
to allow the board to start selling shares again.
Many will now fear this would simply allow more people connected
to the Abramovich regime to gain a say in the future of the
club.
Chelsea have claimed they have exhausted every possibility of
expanding Stamford Bridge to the 55,000 or 60,000 seats they need
to compete with their domestic and European rivals.
Buying back the freehold of Stamford Bridge, they say, would
just give them a stronger negotiating position if they found a new
site.
There could be plenty of change from selling it, even if a new
stadium elsewhere cost £500m to £600m.
Enough change, perhaps, to make a significant dent in the £740m
that Abramovich has spent, at the last count, on transforming
Chelsea.
On the other hand, cash spent on refurbishing Stamford Bridge
would just add to his overall investment in the club.
If the share activity before last October's EGM of Chelsea Pitch
Owners Plc was an attempt to manipulate the vote, it was a bad one
because Chelsea lost.
Yet the fear among some fans is that they will one day soon be
outnumbered by incoming CPO shareholders, who support the club's
plans to leave Stamford Bridge.