Gary Rowett has been appointed as the Birmingham manager following Lee Clark’s sacking and Saturday’s traumatic 8-0 home defeat by Bournemouth but the trials of Blues supporters are unlikely to ease any time soon. While Carson Yeung, principal of the £81.5m takeover of City from David Sullivan and David Gold in 2009, is in prison after a conviction for money-laundering in March, the Hong Kong parent company, Birmingham International Holdings Ltd, shows scant interest in the grim decline it has overseen at St Andrew’s.
A former banker, Panos Pavlakis, whose partner is related to Yeung, has been installed as BIHL’s representative director and has garnered some surprise approval, working in the club’s offices, unlike his predecessor Peter Pannu, who in his last two years rarely came over from Hong Kong.
Pavlakis is said to have been key to BIHL releasing £3m over the summer to tide over the players and giving Clark some money to juggle with in the transfer market. It led to Birmingham actually paying for a player – the midfielder David Davis, signed from Wolves for a fee of around £100,000 – which has become an increasingly rare event in these straitened years.
Pavlakis ensured BIHL agreed the sacking of Clark, who was well regarded within the club and by many Birmingham fans but whose team are second-bottom. They have won only one league match at home since October 2013, a 1-0 victory over Brighton in August. His final two home defeats, to Fulham and Bolton, two other recent Premier League clubs who were inhabiting the Championship relegation area, brought about Clark’s demise.
There was sympathy for him and a recognition Rowett, a former Birmingham defender, will also enter a club shorn of investment and credible direction. They are owned by a Hong Kong-listed company which this month declared £11m losses and £22m bank loans secured on “land and buildings in the UK”, unquestionably St Andrew’s. Clark only just steered Birmingham clear of relegation last season via a last-minute equaliser by Paul Caddis in the final game of the season at Bolton, sending Doncaster Rovers down to League One instead on goal difference. Birmingham are already facing a relegation battle and without some distinct change in fortune, or ownership, a return to health and prosperity remains a far-off aspiration.
This is all a world away from the vision painted by Yeung when he took over at the then Premier League club only five years ago, promising multimillion pound investment and for Birmingham to be a “brand” in China and the far east, the hub of a sportswear and merchandising conglomerate.
In fact, the Hong Kong court found in his trial, Yeung’s £55m fortune was the proceeds of crime which he laundered; and he had a previous conviction, for failing to declare a shareholding in another company, before the Premier League approved his 2009 takeover.
The league decided Yeung was a “fit and proper” person under its rules because that offence, of misleading the Hong Kong stockmarket, would not have been a criminal offence here. The football authorities say they were unaware Yeung was under police investigation for money-laundering at the time he presented himself as the modern visionary for Birmingham City.
City’s statement of its ownership, required under Football League rules, still has Yeung as the single biggest shareholder of BIHL, with a 19.2% stake retained despite his six-year prison sentence. There are reports Yeung has now sold his shares but retains a major option to acquire more, in return for the £15m the club owed him for loans he put in before he was arrested.
The Hong Kong stock exchange on which BIHL, registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven, is listed now notes four other major shareholders: two individuals, Ma Shui Cheong and Yang Yue Zhou, who is thought to be the most significant, and two companies, U-Continent Holdings and Deluxe Crystal. None are familiar to Birmingham fans, who are bewildered by the plight of the club and BIHL’s reluctance to sell it although the supporters trust, Blues Trust, said this month it appreciated having met Pavlakis, who has not yet given any media interviews.
It is understood BIHL is putting up a price of £31m for a sale of Birmingham, which is considered to be impossible to achieve for a financially rundown club on the edge of League One.
Daniel Ivery, author of the excellent Often Partisan website and a book investigating the years under Yeung – a former hairdresser – entitled Haircuts and League Cups, has concluded BIHL is keeping the club because it wants to retain a listed company on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
A new manager is taking charge but a decent new era for Birmingham appears a long way off.
