black morse wrote:Little Shrimp wrote:BerlinWaller wrote:I have been in touch with Niyah Smith via twitter and to be fair, he has been pretty open. I spoke with him on Feb 25th and he told me that Sarb had sent The FA everything they needed to and it was all in The FA's hands. Sarb were waiting to be called to a meeting.
Feb 25th still very sloppy on their part to hand it in, given the amount of time this has been going on for. And the fact that the EFL still aren't happy with it (takeover would have been approved otherwise) raises serious doubts about the legitimacy of their funding.
Something more generally to add - there are other interested parties. A few may have missed this as it's behind a paywall, but Matt Slater (very good and reliable journalist) from the Athletic reported it and the issue being that Sarb are willing to pay well over any reasonable valuation, apparently double what other bidders are offering.
Now, was Mr Grumpy Sarbjot or Jason?
Why on earth would Sarb be willing to do that? Surely anyone would want the club as Cheaply as possible.
Assuming it isn't some kind of con/scam, there are potentially lots of reasons.
When buying a business, there are many ways of buying/funding it. It's not like a house where you just pay a lump sum in exchange for the keys. Though that is a possible method. More likely when bigger money is involved are "paper for paper" swaps, earn-outs based on future performance, etc, or a mixture of different ways. Paper for paper swaps or earn outs are always going to potentially give a higher value than a simple "cash for keys" deal.
Different buyers also have different motives, often tax-based. If the buyer is facing a big tax bill on the previous sale of a business or business assets, he may be in a rush to "buy" a business to use the proceeds to claim tax relief, or if he has high income, he may wish to buy it via a tax incentive scheme such as Enterprise Investment Scheme (or Small enterprise investment scheme) which give both income tax and capital gains tax reliefs. Such tax reliefs are often very significant, so someone may well be happy to pay more for a business because they may get, say, half of it back from tax relief/refunds, compared to someone else who hasn't got a big tax bill and won't get tax relief on buying the business. I believe it's a big motive for professional investors such as Dragons Den, Alan Sugar etc., i.e. there's a kind of "need" to buy into businesses to reduce their tax bills!
So it may well be that our fabled "local consortium" are offering a simple "cash for keys" deal and don't have tax reducing motives, hence offering half of Sarb. Whereas, maybe, Sarb's deal is "paper for paper" and maybe including "earn outs" too., all with tax relief/reduction behind it, meaning his actual "net" cost could be similar or even less than the local consortium, but with higher risks for Dellboy & Rodney as it may not be as much "upfront" cash. No one knows outside the inner circle between buyer and seller, probably not even the Board!