Liverpool FC in severe financial trouble

Really? It's got PR written all over it for me mate.

Entirely agree. Surprised you were suckered in by that article Res.

The reports are not based on inaccurate figures.  The reports in the media are based on financial end of year accounts which have just been lodged with company house.

From the Mail On Sunday:

Rafa's title dream already looks over because of Liverpool's massive debts

By Joe Bernstein and Daniel King, 6th June 2009

Liverpool fans and manager Rafael Benitez fear their hopes of mounting another serious Premier League title challenge are fading because of the financial crisis threatening to engulf the club.

While Benitez is resigned to watching transfer targets follow Gareth Barry and, in all likelihood, Glen Johnson into the clutches of rivals, some supporters are proposing direct action to force American owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett out of the club.

Benitez seems unlikely to be able to make the one or two significant signings which captain Steven Gerrard believes the squad need, with the Americans struggling to make ends meet, let alone compete in the transfer market with the likes of Chelsea,Manchester City and Real Madrid.

The publication of accounts for the club and their holding companies last week laid bare the danger of financial meltdown if Hicks and Gillett fail to refinance their £350million loan facility with Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia.

But now the Spirit of Shankly fans’ group are urging RBS not to agree a new deal with the Americans so that their stakes can be seized and the club sold to new owners.

They are urging fellow supporters to write to Richard Holliday, the RBS manager responsible for Liverpool, and to their Members of Parliament, since the bank is effectively owned by the Government after the multi-billion pound bail-out.

Spokesman John Mackin said: ‘We urge the Royal Bank of Scotland, and our elected representatives, to consider the implications of refinancing Hicks’ and Gillett’s continued ownership of Liverpool Football Club. We will step up the action regarding the Royal Bank of Scotland if this request is not met.’

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that RBS have sought advice from police and other authorities about the prospect of Liverpool fans attacking branches if they did not re-finance the owners’ loans.

But the threat of a boycott — or worse — if the banks do strike a deal puts them in an even more difficult position.

In theory, the club have £30m left of the £350m loan facility, which Benitez could spend on players. But in reality, RBS and Wachovia will not allow cash to be spent on transfers when accountants KPMG are warning that the future of parent company Kop Football (Holdings) as a going concern is in doubt unless the existing borrowings are refinanced.

Benitez has already missed out on Barry, Johnson seems to be Chelsea bound and targets like Valencia’s David Villa and David Silva are seemingly out of Liverpool’s reach.

With Xabi Alonso weighing up a move to Real Madrid, there is the very real prospect of Benitez’s squad emerging from the transfer window weaker rather than stronger.

Fernando Torres and Daniel Agger have yet to sign lucrative new contracts agreed in recent weeks. Neither player is thought to want to leave Anfield, but the suspicion is that the delay owes as much to financial concerns as to being unable to find the time to put pen to paper.

By waiting until mid-July for Torres to sign, Liverpool would save £250,000 as until then they are paying their star striker his current £70,000-a-week rather than the improved rate of £110,000-a-week. Likewise, Agger’s new four-year deal represents a healthy increase in wages and the longer Liverpool can keep it from starting, the better for them.

Agger revealed while on international duty with Denmark this week: ‘Nothing has been signed yet, but I expect to do so when the game against Sweden is over.’

Torres may have to wait longer before he can sign. After the current round of World Cup qualifiers, he is going to South Africa to play for Spain in the Confederations Cup and will not return to Liverpool until mid-July.

'Mail On Sunday can reveal' or we made it up because we hate the people of Liverpool and pander to our readers with our favourite stereotype of you lot too.

Surprised they didn't go the whole hog and call us terrorists!

What. The. F**k.

Just goes to show how incompetent both those two idiots are. When can they get out of the club??

Hicks and Gillett out NOW!!

I can Reveal that the Mail on Sunday, is a Middle of the Road, Tory loving, Nazi view pointed piece of sh*te.

"It's more of a toilet paper than a news Paper"

I can Reveal that the Mail on Sunday, is a Middle of the Road, Tory loving, Nazi view pointed piece of sh*te.

"It's more of a toilet paper than a news Paper"

So not exactly middle of the road, more to the extreme right!

Yes, true I can not stand that paper, always blaiming troubles on Minorities, infact always blaiming. F***ing hate the rag.

Yes, true I can not stand that paper, always blaming troubles on Minorities, infact always blaming. F***ing hate the rag.

Not to mention the editor Paul Dacre (although that might be the Daily Mail itself) is a Hitler loving c**t! And the paper openly supported Oswald Moseley

Back On Topic, this continued speculation by press and fans alike will carry on until July 24.

YANKS OUT NOW! YOU ARE NOT WANTED AT LIVERPOOL FC. I'm not an economist by any stretch of the imagination but anyone can see that the yanks have done us no favours financially. When you read that your club is in debt of this magnitude it is not fu**in nice. Think back and how negative headlines have you read since these pair have taken over. I mean the benitez row, rick parry row, row with each other they have dragged our name through the dirt far to often. As for their promises.. they promised a new stadium .. where is it? it is not going to happen, they promised finances for quality players.. almost everyone we have bought have been through selling and buying wisely to progress take kromkamp, josemi,biscan,nunez,traore,dudek,kewell,baros,cisse, sissoko, crouch, garcia, carsson, finnan etc. If we are to challenge for the title stability is going to be key. We should be in the headlines for the right reasons and it feels just when we are.. something that those two have caused or said takes the shine back of our achievements and limits our progress. YANKS OUT S O S

In todays Observer by Lawrence Donegan the Guardian's golf correspondent.

Loan ranger Tom Hicks Kops the blame for problems at Liverpool

The Liverpool co-owner has a track record of strange decisions when it comes to running sport 'franchises'


These are heady days for fans of the Texas Rangers, who now find themselves in the unusual position of supporting winners. Not since the turn of the century have the Arlington-based team reached baseball's play-offs, not since 2004 have they really been in contention to win the American League West.

There may be many reasons for this sustained run of mediocrity, but prime among them surely has been the club's apparently insatiable appetite for financial dramas. When things are going well on the field, the Rangers can usually be relied upon to stumble into some kind of off-the-field tribulations guaranteed to sidetrack players, officials and supporters. So it has been in recent days with the announcement that Tom Hicks is willing to cede control of a team he bought in 1998 from, among others, George W Bush.

"With the right partners, I would be willing to sell a controlling interest in the Rangers. My family and I want very much to stay involved with the club, but we understand that we may have to be open to solutions that may include partners who own a controlling interest in the Rangers,'' Liverpool's co-owner said in a statement at the end of last week, before adding a pay-off so lacking in self-awareness that it was almost comical: "I don't want any of this to be a distraction to the team and our fans."

If any of this sounds familiar to Liverpool fans, who have watched their beloved club slide into almost constant tumult, at least off the field, since Hicks and his business partner George Gillett arrived on Merseyside back in 2007, then it was the same old story, too, in the States, where Hicks has earned a reputation for what the New York Times called wrong-headedness.

"How can it not be a distraction?" the paper asked this week of his announcement about his plans to sell the Rangers. "This is a team for which being in first place a third into the season is a new experience, and its players have to deal with reports and questions about the team being for sale."

Hicks, an old school Republican, can live with the criticism of a liberal newspaper like the New York Times. Harder to bear is the personal embarrassment that comes with the acknowledgment of defeat in his battle to remain in control of the Rangers. Only three months ago, he had insisted that while he wanted to sell at least some of his 95% holding in the Rangers he was interested only in having minority partners. Much has happened since then, not least the Hicks' decision to default on over $500m in loans tied to his ownership of the Rangers and the Dallas Stars ice hockey team.

At the time the Rangers owner was bullish, calling the move a "non-event" designed to bring his creditors to the negotiating table. Clearly, it was more complicated than that, to put it one way. To put it another: he was unwilling to accept the truth; that he did not have the financial wherewithal to meet demands from Major League Baseball to reduce the size of the club's debt. The only option he was left with was to sell the club.

This is embarrassing indeed for a man such as Hicks, who relished the caché that came with owning a major league baseball team and never missed an opportunity to throw his money around, lest anyone in Texas and elsewhere was unaware of exactly how rich he was.

Not for him the low-key approach adopted by others, the likes of Randy Lerner (owner of the NFL's Cleveland Browns), Stan Kroenke (owner of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA) and Malcolm Glazer, who controls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL. Gillett was another who preferred to remain in the background, stewarding one of ice hockey's most storied clubs, the Montreal Canadiens, in a fashion entirely at variance with the man who was to become his business partner in English football.

While Lerner, Kroenke and Glazer, who have all bought their way into English football in recent years, at Aston Villa, Arsenal and Manchester United, respectively, could give Greta Garbo lessons in maintaining studied mystery, Hicks has seldom come across a microphone he did not want to pontificate into or a stage he did not want to hog.

His outgoing personality (or out-sized ego, depending on who you ask) was an asset in the world of leveraged buy-outs, where his chutzpah helped him build a personal fortune using other peoples' money to buy and sell companies. But it ill-served him in the world of sport, where he allowed his ego to cloud his better judgment, both in what he said and in what he did.

Famously, or rather infamously, he allowed himself to be talked into the biggest single contract for an athlete in history – a 10-year, $250m deal for the short-stop Alex Rodriguez. At the time, this was seen as a bold declaration of intent by the Rangers owner. Looking back, now that Rodriguez has long departed for the New York Yankees and details of the deals have been made public (the next highest bid for Rodriguez's service at the time was a reported $170m), it would be fair to say it was a supreme act of folly, perhaps the greatest ever in American professional sport (which really is saying something).

Yet Hicks ploughed on: on to the next bad baseball deal, on to the next losing season and finally on to Liverpool, where he and Gillett have guided the Merseyside club towards the financial precipice.

The news that Liverpool are hampered by debts of £300m-plus – that their owners, who promised to be "different" from the Glazers, who borrowed other peoples' money to buy Manchester United, were in fact exactly the same – has shocked English football. But perhaps more shocking is that few people had apparently noticed before now. Hicks himself had admitted, in an interview shortly after he and Gillett bought the club, that any profits earned would be used to service their debt.

"When I was in the leveraged buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business.

"It is the same for Liverpool. Revenues come in from whatever source and go out to whatever source and, if there is money left over, it is profit," he said at the time, with commendable honesty.

Like Weetabix, Liverpool FC is an enduring brand name. It was there before Tom Hicks arrived and it will be there when he is gone, as inevitably will happen one day, probably sooner than later. Whatever happens before, expect the Texan to issue a statement expressing his hope that none of the tumult at Anfield is a distraction for the club and fans.

Expect him to be sadly disappointed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/jun/07/hicks-liverpool-football

Good reading.

Very very interesting

Having read several newspaper articles and spending hours on the internet since the news broke Thursday evening, it is abundantly clear that Hicks and Gillett have put Liverpool Football Club into severe financial difficulties to feed their own greed.  They are not English, have not interest in the game of football or its fans.  

Working in the financial section I know from experience that the auditors would not have issued the warning lightly.  Liverpool football club is on the edge of a precipice due to two incompetent Americans, who have no business acumen whatsoever.  As fans, all we can do is ban together, get petitions going, starting up groups and hopefully someone will finally listen to us.  I think we also need to get one of the major newspapers behind us.  I am not sure how to do but I am looking at writing to some of them so see if they can set up a campaign.  We need to get Hicks and Gillett removed from Liverpool Football Club and also get their directorship licenses revoked. I honestly believe that if time was taken to investigate them properly we would a catalogue of financial disasters behind them (and I do not mean the ones already out in the public arena)

I honestly wonder what Rick Parry and David Moores were thinking off when they sighed the take over papers - or rather what bribes they fell for.  I can't honestly believe they did it without thinking it was right for the club.  The amount of sleepless nights they have had since must be horrendous.  

What we need now is too all band together and save our club - we have until midnight on 23rd July to stop the circus continuing.  DCI if you are listening or looking please help us - Liverpool Football Club must not be allowed to fail both on and off the pitch

I suggest that you all join THE SPIRIT OF SHANKLY.Apparently there is a millitant section advocating direct action,the time for marching down the road has passed my friends.
I reckon we should 1.Boycott all stores and merchandise.
                           2.Boycott all food and drink at the ground.
                           3.Evacuate stands as a symbol of revolt.
                           4.Use pickets to achieve effective protest.
                           5.Turn marxist on the yank bas**rds.

Reading the papers is dark and depressing at the moment. It would appear that LFC are in deep deep sh*t !!!
Where the hell did it go wrong?
I cannot believe that LFC have been sold down the river by two of American idiots !!

So! Liverpool in severe financial trouble. And what do the owners do? Take the piss once again with expenses.

When they're sitting at Anfield miming the words to You'll Never Walk Alone, that's right, we're paying for that. And I'd love to know exactly what else were paying for. It's all a bit cloudy as to what...

Liverpool pay US owners millions in expenses

Liverpool are being made to pay almost £2m to cover the travel, legal and other personal expenses of the club's owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. The accounts published for the owners' holding company, Kop Football, for the year to 31 July 2008, show that Hicks charged £192,000 for "third party consulting, travel and other expenses," while Gillett charged £129,000 for "reimbursable travel, legal, personnel and other expenses".

The two men charged significant amounts of money for the same expenses, incurred by themselves personally "and affiliated companies", during the previous seven-month accounting period, which ran from 18 December 2006 to 31 July 2007, too. Hicks charged Kop £198,000, while Gillett charged £375,000.

The pair also claimed almost £1m for what are described in the accounts as "transaction-related expenses". Hicks and affiliated companies charged Kop £133,000 in this category, while Gillett's figure was much higher: £823,000. The total charged to Kop in expenses, for the owners and their affiliated companies, in 18 months from their takeover in early February 2007 to the accounts' end date of 31 July 2008, was £1.85m.

The accounts do not explain in further detail what "consulting, travel, legal, personnel and other expenses" were, or which were regarded as "reimbursable", and Hicks and Gillett were not available to respond with details yesterday. Nor was there any explanation of what constituted "transaction-related expenses". However, the only substantial transaction from December 2006 to July 2007 was the pair's takeover of the club itself. They borrowed £185m from the Royal Bank of Scotland to buy Liverpool in February 2007, and the club has been made responsible for paying the interest on that loan. Now it seems the club has also been made to pay for the pair's costs of doing the deal.

The accounts, published last week, showed that Kop owed a total of £313m to the Royal Bank of Scotland and ­Wachovia in January this year, and that £36.8m was payable in interest last year. Kop's only asset is Liverpool Football Club so the interest, and the reimbursement of expenses, have to come from the club's income, made from television, supporters paying to watch matches, and other commercial earnings. Hicks and Gillett did loan Kop £58.2m from their holding company in the Cayman Islands last year.

Not all the expenses claimed had been paid by July 2008. The accounts state that of the £523,000 charged by Hicks and his affiliates, £188,000 was still owed, which meant he had been paid £335,000 by Liverpool. Of the £1.327m Gillett claimed for his expenses, £255,000 was outstanding, so Liverpool had paid him £1.072m.

The revelation about the expenses has further incensed supporters' groups who have campaigned for Hicks and Gillett to sell up and leave. The groups accuse the pair of breaking their promise not to make the club pay for their own borrowings to take it over, as the Glazer family did at Manchester United. Liverpool was sold because the previous chairman, David Moores, and chief executive, Rick Parry, believed the club needed wealthy backers to build the long-planned new stadium on Stanley Park, yet the North American pair have not found the finance.

James McKenna, spokesman for the Spirit of Shankly fans' group, said: "Hicks and Gillett were the multimillionaires who promised not to do a Glazer and that work would start on the new stadium within 60 days. Yet now we find, as fans, not only are we paying for their takeover, but we are also paying for their costs of having done it, and, for coming over to visit the football club. They were supposed to bring investment to take the club forward, but it turns out we're even paying their travel costs."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jun/08/liverpool-tom-hicks-george-gillet

redkenny.. wow, that article actually made me feel sick to the stomach. so not only will they be tight-arsed about the amount of money we get for transfers, we actually are spending money that could be put towards football related expense on them to jetset all around the world doing whatever useless crap they do???!!!!  What bloody right do they think they have to screw our club in the behind, and then charge us for it?? These men.. Wait i should say schoolboys. These schoolboys are the worst thing to ever happen to Liverpool, and we gotta get rid of them. Kick them out, tear up there passports and never let them back near England, let alone Liverpool, again. End of story

It's been all over the news on the radio here today about this. Turns my stomach!

f***in sick of them yank cu*ts running our great club into the ground, money grabbing bas**rds, why cant they just sell up and F**k off back to america, can't they see their not wanted here

You could equate this with the other set of parasites - MP's shafting everyone with their ''expenses" blag, spending other peoples money the fuckers  get so arrogant they see themselves as untouchable,its downwright fraud but as ever its one law for them cu*ts and......blah,blah F***ing blah.

Isn't this expenses story old hat? I'm sure we knew they were claiming expenses the last time the accounts were published.

Still pisses me off, but I am sure ths is not a new story.

Here we are

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/liverpool/2302829/Liverpools-owners-Tom-Hicks-and-George-Gillett-Jnr-put-in-a-1.5m-expenses-bill.html

Liverpool's owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jnr put in a £1.5m expenses bill

By Sandy Macaskill
Published: 7:30AM BST 10 Jun 2008

Warring Liverpool owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jnr are likely to face renewed criticism as the extent of the club's debts become known now that the pair have published their first set of accounts since taking over at Anfield in March 2007.
etc etc...

Just kill the yankee wanking bas**rds .

Here we are

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/liverpool/2302829/Liverpools-owners-Tom-Hicks-and-George-Gillett-Jnr-put-in-a-1.5m-expenses-bill.html

Liverpool's owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jnr put in a £1.5m expenses bill

By Sandy Macaskill
Published: 7:30AM BST 10 Jun 2008

Warring Liverpool owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jnr are likely to face renewed criticism as the extent of the club's debts become known now that the pair have published their first set of accounts since taking over at Anfield in March 2007.
etc etc...

That's from last year. The article I posted was from Monday just gone, this year. Monday 8 June 2009 22.00 BST

We all knew they were on the claim last year. Now it seems they haven't stopped and they've claimed more - on things that aren't exactly clear.

Yes I know, it's just that we knew they are claiming expences from last year, so it makes no surprise that they are still at it.

So the new artical is no real shock, well not to me. July 24th can not come soon enough.

Sorry for any confussion, I knew it was not a jurno digging up and re-hashng old suff, just not a "new" story, but may be an on-going one.