With the football season now over for Birmingham City, the focus has turned to the summer ahead and the challenges to come in the transfer window. Relegation means that Blues have a whole new set of financial rules to comply with which focus on a different methodology of levelling the financial playing field.
Despite all the work going on around St Andrew’s in recent months, there has been consistent gossip among Blues fans about the potential for a move to a new stadium. This has been fuelled by people talking about the redevelopment of Birmingham Wheels Park and the potential to build there.
A heavy 4-2 defeat to Bristol City on Saturday has left Birmingham City not only 18th in the Championship table, but has massively increased concerns of relegation among some fans. This lack of form coupled with the collapse of the Maxco “takeover” and news from the far east that BSHL do not wish to sell has in turn caused the idea of protest to once again be spoken out loud.
Last week I visited Phnom Penh, Cambodia to attempt to understand and report more about the convoluted ownership of Birmingham City. While the appointment of Ian Dutton as Managing Director in Birmingham has bought some much needed change to the way the club Is being run on a day-to-day level, I wanted to learn more about the owners above him; who they are and what their intentions are.
One of the most complex things to understand about Birmingham City is just who owns the club. While the simple answer would be to point to the Hong Kong listed company Birmingham Sports Holdings, the ownership of that company is opaque due to the number of investment vehicles incorporated in the British Virgin Islands who own stakes in the company. Throw into the mix people owning stakes in the club directly and you’ve got a mess.
Everyone knows that Birmingham City are owned by a company based in Hong Kong, but how much is actually known about them and what they do? In this second refresher article about the powers that be behind the club, I’ve taken a look at Birmingham Sports Holdings.
With the football season pretty much over, I wanted to turn my attention back to the ownership of Birmingham City. Although the departure of Ren Xuandong from his roles as CEO and Director of the club has been welcomed almost universally by Blues fans, I think there are still some reservations over how the ownership of the club will run the club going forward.
Not much is known about the current largest shareholder in Birmingham City, Vong Pech. Although he owns just over 40% of Blues via Cambodian development company Graticity Real Estate Development Ltd and BVI investment company Oriental Rainbow Investments, nothing has been forthcoming from Vong about his purchase of a tranche of the club. In this third piece on Vong, I’ve taken a look at another project he part-owns in Cambodia, and it’s links to another Hong Kong listed company.
Two consecutive days of share price rises have pushed the stock market capitalisation of Birmingham Sports Holdings to £378M as of close of play on Friday. It seems an insanely high figure for a company which makes the majority of its revenue via Blues. In today’s piece I’ve taken a deep dive into just what else BSH does to try to make some sense of what is happening.
On Friday, I published a lengthy article outlining just how tangled a web the ownership of Birmingham City FC is. In this article I am concentrating on new shareholders in the club Oriental Rainbow Investments Ltd – and why their investment is indicative of issues the club faces.
