The son of former Conservative Party deputy chairman and billionaire donor Michael Ashcroft has taken over his father’s 3.4% stake in Tottenham in another generational change at the north London club.
A public filing posted by the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday shows that Andrew Ashcroft, a hotelier and businessman, purchased 8,023,942 Tottenham shares last Friday. The price is not disclosed, but based on recent valuations of Tottenham the shares are likely to have cost around £100m.
Lord Ashcroft is a longstanding Tottenham shareholder who at one stage owned around 4% of the club. The change has been made public under 8.3 of the Takeover Code as Tottenham are currently in an official offer period, with all shareholders of more than one per cent required to disclose their holding. Small shareholders own 13.42% of Spurs, with Ashcroft’s stake is thought to be the largest.
Tottenham’s majority shareholder ENIC, of which the former club chairman Daniel Levy owns 29.88%, has not sold any of its shares and is adamant the club is not for sale. Levy left the board suddenly this month after 25 years as the club’s most senior director and has been replaced by Peter Charrington, a long-time adviser of the Lewis family who own ENIC, as non-executive chairman. In other significant changes Lewis’ children, Vivienne and Charles, have become more involved at Tottenham without taking formal positions on the board.
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Tottenham subsequently announced that they had rejected two preliminary expressions of interest in buying the club from Amanda Staveley’s PCP Capital Partners and an American/Chinese consortium led by Roger Kennedy and Firehawk Holdings Limited. Under takeover panel rules the club remain under the official offer period until 5 October, by which point PCP and the consortium must either make a formal offer for the club or announce they have no plans to do so.
Andrew Ashcroft was based in Belize, where he owns a hotel and his father has substantial business interests, until 2021 when his then partner Jasmine Hartin was charged with manslaughter after accidentally shooting a police officer. Hartin was spared prison after pleading guilty, but Ashcroft obtained custody of their two children and moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands to launch a new business venture.
In 2019 Andrew Ashcroft was hauled off an American Airlines flight in handcuffs and arrested for public intoxication after the pilots were forced to abandon the take-off due to his behaviour.
