Money laundering eh-perhaps solicit some help from the Southside.
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Money laundering eh-perhaps solicit some help from the Southside.
Sounds like the kind of operation that would offer to pay Craig Thomson to give a penalty & red card in the cup final in 2012
In 2008 Hearts converted £12million of debt into equity i.e. shares, which were valued at 10p per share. In 2010 they converted a further £10 million of debt for equity on the same basis, all of which gives a total or 220 million shares. After the second swap the Hearts website indicated that this would mean that the number of ordinary shares would total something in the order of 142 million, which doesn't make arithmetical sense. Their website also indicated that, at that time, UBIG owned slightly less than 47 million ordinary shares or 95% of the company. That doesn't make arithmetical sense either of course. However, at the point, just before it all went belly-up, they asked the fans to provide around £1.8 million for a 10% share of the club, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t make any arithmetical sense either.
None of these transactions were queried at the time nor have they been since by our dynamic, investigative Scottish media i.e. a journalist with a calculator and opposable thumbs. These figures and statements alone would surely warrant investigation because the shareholders and creditors of both UKIO BANKAS and UBIG might just feel it is reasonable to know exactly how many shares were purchased on their behalf and what percentage they constitute in terms of the overall value of Hearts. It does, after all, reflect on their value. If the club, its shares and assets are now worth £2.5 million, I reckon those fans who provided the £1.8 million should actually own over 70% of Hearts, which I believe is around the amount of shares that are now being purchased for £50K to the apparent delight of the Hearts fans who paid £1.8 million for them last year...or am I just confusing things?
How well all of this reflects on Scottish journalism is fairly obvious...pathetically.
OK, a couple of fairly random but associated thoughts on recent posts.
1. Washing the Lithuanian money. IIRC was there not a period where most of Yams marquee signings were officially Kaunas players? I know someone has commented on wages being transferred from Lithuania but I'm sure it would have been possible for loan fees also to have been charged. Mind you, how this would have escaped the eagle eyes of Johnson Carmichael is a mystery! I think GG's probably on the money however re large sums being moved through offshore entities.
2. Building on the above it's yet another wonderful example of Yam ignorance. There are many posters both on Brokeback & EEN who somehow claim we are cheating by playing loan players. This not only ignores the Kaunas situation but forgets recent beauties such as Danny ( nae suspension ) Wilson, Ngoo, who helped them to the LC final & currently McCallum, who TBF, they're desperately trying to forget!
Thank heavens for Yams, it really helps us avoid thinking about our own situation!
There's a confusion between nominal value, issue price and share premiums here. The 2008 share issue consisted of £34,285,714 shares with a nominal value of 10p - that increased the share capital by £3.4m (rounded off). They were issued at a price of 35p - a premium of 25p - which increased the share premium by £8.5m. The issue reduced debt £12m - 34m x 35p. The other conversion followed a similar pattern.
The real question was why this was done. The club was already worthless and this action reduced UBIG's potentially recoverable debtor into an unrecoverable (i.e. worthless) investment. Since UBIG was an investment-based concern it seems likely that the motive was to falsely inflate their balance sheet by massively overvaluing the HoMFC shareholding.
:top marks
So it all makes sense now. If you can borrow money from yourself, you can then use that money to buy your football club, from yourself. Presumably you then repay the loan from the money you received from yourself in payment for the club you sold to yourself. Then everybody is happy, especially yourself.
These transactions, along with the debt forgiveness and inter co invoices, are going to be the ones that will interest and be scrutinised by the Lith Fraud Squad. I would guess that these investigations will have to be completed before any assets are let go. Thoughts?
They were signed off, but apart from the 2012 ones they weren't 'clean'. They all carried a qualification to the effect that the auditors could not establish whether UBIG were capable of providing the support they claimed to be offering, therefore they (the auditors) were unsure whether the accounts gave a true and fair view.
The unqualified report given for the 2012 accounts, signed and published only a few months before HoMFC entered administration looks to me like a massive misjudgement at the very best.
Indeed. In total these transactions 'cost' UBIG something in the region of £67m - since UBIG will not be paying their creditors a sum in excess of that amount HoMFC are ultimately responsible for those creditors' losses. In effect they stole that money from them - that's cheating, taking players on loan and paying off your debts as they fall due is standard business practice.
I seem to recall talk at some time of increasing the book value of UKIO/UBIG assets as the LT authorities required exposure to be within a certain percentage - they didn't have enough assets on the books for the debt they carried or some such thing. This was also the times Vlad was allegedly pumping his own money into various organisations, which the yams took to illustrate just how minted he was.
That's exactly what they were up to. Vlad valued the Yams at £ 50 million, not because he had any hope of getting a fraction of that amount, but to put on his balance sheet to justify the vast sums of Ukio Bankas cash " apparently " spent on them.
That's why he went bananas when FoH. went public with their £ 200 K offer for the whole shooting match. :greengrin
Point 1 I would suggest the fees have been "charged" against profits and added to the Loan accounts of UBIG, UKIO or whomever and no "cash" will have changed hands.
There was a qualification n 2012 around support rom Lithuania.
Spot on.
2012
I would think this is a racing certainty.
That should have been the clue and, in my opinion, a massive misjudgement by the auditors.
Have a look at the BDO creditors list a see what the Aduitors were due !
The share issue took the number of shares in issue to just under 47m - at the issue price of 35p that confers a fictional value of about £16.5m on the club before 'goodwill'. Add the £34m debt that was left and you get to Mr Romanov's valuation and that was probably the asset that UBIG were showing in their accounts. One look at HoMFC (IA)'s accounts would show that they were in fact worth furcall.
Yeah, Johnston Carmichael due £ 100, they made sure they got their £140,000 or whatever fee before signing.
Their solicitors, HBJ Gately Waring , got stung for £ 44,313.00 which was pleasing, as I'm sure they would have been behind many of the legal " tricks " employed by the Yams over the Vlad years.
Just back from a weekend away lots of catching up tp do
any meeting confirmation yet ??