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Newcastle United - Share Holder Future ?
Have the Halls have given up on being good for the club? They are making large amounts of money for themselves. Halls are big winners (17m profit), NUFC a very disappointing loser (£62m loss). The Halls may sell up but it will be a slow process, and it is likely it will be under their terms.
The Shepherds may well have plans to own the club outright. They could be slowly building up a big enough number of shares to make the Halls an offer they can't refuse. It is not clear where the Shepherds would find the extra money to buy the rest of the shares.
The Halls have very skilfully split their share holding into three groups. The largest is held in the name of Wynyard Ltd, which owns 36m shares, or about 28% of the total club shares. According to stock market rules if someone buys 30% of the shares then they have to bid for them all. This means someone could approach Sir John and buy that 28% chunk as a whole and would not be forced to try and by all the rest.
The reason anyone would be interested in buying NUFC would seem to be the new Sky money due in the 2007/2008 season. A potential investor would see that the board have managed to gain £35m in share related profits while the TV money has been good. Their hope would be that they could take even more money out of the bigger pot.
It is also difficult to work out why the Shepherds would want to do buy, apart from the money side of things. The other thought they may have is just to make money while they can. There are ways to do this that are hard to spot. Take the clubs decision to rent a warehouse from Bruce Shepherd for an annual rent of £150,000 for 17 years, or a total cost of £2.5m. The warehouse cost Shepherd £175,000 to buy. (from The Observer 12 April 2005)
The best way forward would be for the fans to own the club, so we could stop individuals who are more interested in money than the football team. Man U fans tried to do this by clubbing together to own shares to try and stop unwanted money grabbers taking over. Sadly someone always has more money and the Man U fans failed. Other options can be seen at the Football Governance Research Centre site, although some of it pretty heavy stuff !!
| Share History | Current Shares | Future Share |
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