Roman Abramovich Thread

[Vesper 27,315]

Roman Abramovich confirms Chelsea are for sale and writes off £1.5bn loans

https://theathletic.com/news/roman-abramovich-confirms-Chelsea-are-for-sale-and-writes-off-15bn-loans/33NLbNbnl3bV/

[Vesper 27,315]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

Russians are threated these days like Jews in Nazi Germany...

 

College Backtracks on Banning Teaching Dostoevsky Because He's Russian

https://www.newsweek.com/college-backtracks-banning-teaching-dostoevsky-russian-1684080

A university in Italy has backtracked on a decision to postpone a course about the work of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky following a backlash.

Italian writer Paolo Nori posted a video on Instagram on Tuesday saying he had received an email from officials at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Milan, informing him of the decision to postpone his course following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Dear Professor, the Vice Rector for Didactics has informed me of a decision taken with the rector to postpone the course on Dostoevsky," the email said, according to Nori's video. "This is to avoid any controversy, especially internally, during a time of strong tensions."

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CakmLRqguxO/

Nori said he had been invited by the university to deliver the four-session course on Dostoevsky, whose novels include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, starting from next Wednesday.

"They invited me. Each lesson was 90-minutes long. They were free and open to everyone," he said.

Nori went on: "I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous."

"Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy today, but also being a dead Russian, who was sentenced to death in 1849 because he read a forbidden thing. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable," he said.

Nori's video sparked an outcry, with several notable figures criticizing the university's decision.

Matteo Renzi, Italy's former prime minister who is now a senator for Florence, tweeted that it was "insane" to prohibit studying Dostoevsky because of the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"In this time we need to study more, not less: in the university we need teachers, not incapable bureaucrats," Renzi wrote.

On Wednesday, the university released a statement on its social media accounts confirming the course would go ahead.

"The University of Milano-Bicocca is a university open to dialogue and listening even in this very difficult period that sees us dismayed at the escalation of the conflict," the statement said.

"The course of the writer Paolo Nori is part of the writing course aimed at students and citizens who aim to develop transversal skills through forms of writing. The university confirms that this course will take place in the established groups and will deal with the contents already agreed with the writer. In addition, the rector of the university will meet Paolo Nori next week for a moment of reflection," it said.

Newsweek has contacted Nori and the university for additional comment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, accompanied by Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova, visits the Moscow's Dostoevsky House museum on the day of Russian novelist's 200th birthday in Moscow on November 11, 2021. The University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, reversed a decision to ban a course on Dostoevsky on March 2, 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine seven days earlier.

Edited March 3, 2022 by Vesper

[Superblue 6,331]

 

This doesn't sound promising.

[Vesper 27,315]

21 minutes ago, Superblue_1986 said:

 

This doesn't sound promising.

we are NOT a bloody political statement, we are a FOOTBALL club

hard pass on this bloke

[Vesper 27,315]

How much will someone pay for Abramovich’s Chelsea now?

https://theathletic.com/3158800/2022/03/03/how-much-abramovich-Chelsea/

A couple of months ago, we wrote a piece about how you value something as unusual as a football club.

A multiple of how much money they earn every year? How many fans or Facebook followers they have? Or the number of shirts they sell? By looking at how much the club down the road went for and playing a game of higher or lower?

Another method was proposed by a “Michael C” in the comments section. A musicals lover, Michael riffed on the song Seasons of Love from Rent and suggested the value of a club should be measured in highlights, victories, players, titles and love.

It was definitely the most interesting answer but it was still wrong because the only answer that holds water every time is that a club is worth what someone will pay for it.

So, how much will someone pay for Chelsea, England’s fourth-most successful team, global football’s eighth-richest club, the recently-crowned world champions — especially now Roman Abramovich has stuck a great big “For Sale” sign outside?

And, wait, there are a few more variables to consider.

How much will someone pay for them when their owner has been named in the House of Commons by the leader of the opposition, who asked “why on earth hasn’t” he been sanctioned in the UK? And if that did happen, what are you actually buying, how would you pay for it, and who would get the money?

Hold on, there is more.

What if we told you there was a way you might be able to do this deal before any of those complications became an issue but the amount you pay is now a charitable donation to the victims of the war in Ukraine? You thought you were buying a football club. Now you are helping millions of people whose lives have been blown upside down. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when that gets debated by an investment committee at a Wall Street hedge fund.

Before we go any further with these forays into uncharted territory, let us make one thing very clear: none of this really matters when compared to what is happening in Ukraine. It is only football and money, after all.

But football — English football, in particular — has been ignoring how its business arrangements stack up against global issues like wars for far too long. This has been coming.

So, football is an uncomfortable, embarrassing and, frankly, weird place, and it has been there ever since Chelsea owner Abramovich tried to hand over “stewardship” of the club to its charitable foundation on Saturday. That was a none-too-cunning plan to create some distance between himself and the club he has bankrolled since 2003.

On Sunday, Chelsea lost a remarkable Carabao Cup final to Liverpool: a game that featured 34 shots, four disallowed goals, and a penalty shoot-out that only finished when the goalkeeper that Chelsea brought off the bench because of his shot-stopping prowess followed 21 successful penalties by blasting the ball over the bar and into the Liverpool end.

On Monday, while the war in Ukraine got more barbaric, it became obvious that the charity switch was not going to work.

On Tuesday, Conservative politician Bob Seely used parliamentary privilege to name all the British bankers, lawyers and PR firms who have helped Russian oligarchs launder their money and reputations in London, while Prime Minister Boris Johnson was harangued, live on TV, by a Ukrainian journalist for failing to do more to help her country or hurt the oligarchs in Moscow-on-Thames.

By Wednesday, reports that Chelsea were for sale were everywhere. A Swiss newspaper even had quotes from a potential buyer. Chelsea had stopped denying these stories at this stage, which meant journalists were now free to dust off “runners and riders” pieces about potential new owners. And then, at lunchtime, opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer used his first dart in the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session at parliament to ask why Abramovich had not been sanctioned yet.

Johnson, for what it is worth, said he could not comment on individual cases, before harrumphing on to a list of all the sanctions his government has brought in to defeat Russian aggression. The only impression any sentient being could take from the exchange was that it feels like it is only a matter of time before Abramovich’s name might appear on a sanctions list — unless, of course, the businessman’s reported peace-making works and Russian president Vladimir Putin orders his boys to turn back, which feels unlikely at this stage.

So, to return to the original question, how much are Chelsea worth?

No rush, but Abramovich is understood to have set a deadline of Friday for offers and this is one you would definitely want to mull over.

We know how much they were worth the last time they changed hands. He paid British businessman Ken Bates £140 million for the west London club.

That was 19 years and 21 domestic, European, and global trophies ago. When they won the Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi last month, Chelsea completed the set of trophies they could win under Abramovich’s ownership — an undeniably impressive achievement but one that has cost him 10 times the purchase price in cash injections to balance the club’s books.

That £1.5 billion investment, the amazing managers and players it has bought, all those trophies and the sponsors they have attracted, have all added to Chelsea’s value. They are no longer worth £150 million. But how much more?

According to the valuation rankings compiled by US business magazine Forbes every year, they are worth about £2.4 billion. A report last year by financial services firm KPMG had them at £1.7 billion.

Three years ago, the last time Abramovich tested the market, he knocked back bids of just over £2 billion from US investor Todd Boehly and British industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The feedback was he wanted well north of £2.5 billion, prompting Ratcliffe to describe the cost of buying one of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ as “stratospheric”. It is understood his position has not changed.

Ratcliffe bought Nice instead but his comments about the prohibitive cost of major English football clubs still ring true. Three weeks ago, when The Athletic first heard that Abramovich had asked New York-based merchant bank Raine Group to gauge interest in Chelsea again, the asking price had ballooned to more than £4 billion.

Chelsea strongly denied the club were up for sale, by the way. And every club is for sale in a “make me an offer” kind of way, so perhaps there was nothing to this. Raine had played the estate-agent role back in 2019, so maybe this was just a case of Chinese whispers or wishful thinking.

But then Western intelligence sources started talking about the presence of what looked a lot like a Russian invasion force on the Ukraine border and it became obvious that someone was going to have to get a handle on how much a UK-based asset, which requires top-ups of £80 million a year, owned by an oligarch who has been unable to live here since 2018 because the government believes he is closely linked to Putin, is worth now. Abramovich has always vehemently denied being close to the Kremlin or having done anything that merits a punishment.

For a clue about Chelsea’s value, let us look at what has happened to the value of Abramovich’s other big British investment: his 29 per cent shareholding in the UK-listed Russian steel manufacturer Evraz.

On 16 February, the 55-year-old transferred those shares from an offshore holding company, based in the British Virgin Islands, to himself. A move which should, in theory, make it easier for him to sell them. The share price was £3.30, which valued his stake at about £1.5 billion.

Eight days later, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. It has been denied those tanks are made from Evraz steel but some military experts in the West are not convinced. Either way, Evraz’s shares were worth 60 pence on Wednesday and will, most likely, be worth less in the coming days. Abramovich’s stake is now valued at £300 million.

If we were to apply the same value-shredding algorithm to Chelsea FC, last month’s £4 billion price tag should now be at about £800 million.

Hold on a minute, I can hear Chelsea fans from Cobham to Cape Town cry “you cannot compare what investors think about Russia’s biggest steel manufacturer to the value of one of the most successful football teams on the planet! Chelsea’s squad must be worth £800 million alone, what about all the rest of it?”.

What, you mean the tired, creaking and undersized stadium that would cost at least £1 billion to rebuild? That is a project even Abramovich has decided is too expensive and too much trouble to touch.

And Evraz is not on any government’s list of sanctioned parties. The crash in its value is pretty much in keeping with what the rest of the world thinks of all Russian assets, wherever or whatever they are.

So, to recap, Abramovich could not get an offer of more than £2.2 billion three years ago, when nobody was standing up in parliament or in press conferences asking why he had not had his British assets frozen yet, COVID-19 had not ravaged the global transfer market, the European Super League was still a threat/prospect that carried some weight, and building materials were a third of their current cost… but he was asking for £4 billion a month ago?

The Athletic has been asking contacts who operate in the half-spaces of football’s mergers and acquisitions world for their thoughts on a current value and they range from “God knows” to “about a £1 billion but they’ll have to be fast” — and that was before Abramovich’s statement further muddied the waters.

If you missed it (where have you been?!), it started by restating his commitment to always take decisions with Chelsea’s “best interest at heart”, before getting to the words millions of Chelsea fans have dreaded: “I have taken the decision to sell the club”.

The sale, he continued, will not be “fast-tracked but will follow due process” and he will not be asking for his £1.5 billion in loans to be repaid. Furthermore, he will be setting up a charitable foundation “where all net proceeds from the sale will be donated” and it will be “for the benefit of all the victims of the war in Ukraine”.

He finishes by saying the decision to sell has been “incredibly difficult” and it “pains me to part with the club in this manner”, before adding that he would like to visit Stamford Bridge “one last time to say goodbye to all of you in person”, how proud he is of “our joint achievements” and that Chelsea and its supporters will “always be in my heart”.

That dropped on Chelsea’s website and social media channels about an hour before their FA Cup fifth-round tie at Luton Town. You have to feel sorry for fans who came looking for team news.

But is there ever a good time to tell people you are leaving them?

Maybe someone — Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss and whoever answers the “come join me” plea he issued in a Swiss newspaper on Wednesday, perhaps — will have the money and thick skin needed to do this deal while it is still possible, but will they be willing to lose £80 million a year on keeping Roman’s empire intact?

I think we can cross off most US-based investors from that list. They do not just want to not lose money. They actually expect a return on investment at some point. Chinese investors? They have been summoned home. A Gulf state? Erm, are we never going to learn our lesson?

And then there is the ticking clock on how much longer Abramovich has as “just a businessman who happens to be Russian”. Maybe the UK government will give him just enough time to pull off this exit, although that would pose even more questions about the UK government’s sense of priorities at the moment. No, there are no easy off-ramps or straightforward solutions to any of this.

Chelsea beat Luton, by the way, twice coming back from deficits to win 3-2. Luton were relegated from the top flight the season before the Premier League started and have endured many more relegations, brushes with bankruptcy and points deductions since then. But they are on their way back now, with no debts, great owners and a new stadium to look forward to.

What value would Chelsea fans put on that?

[Superblue 6,331]

This Swiss/American bid has been leaked so heavily through the media I already don't like it.

Whilst it was at times frustrating that the club act as a closed shop, there always felt so much more dignity and control over things and I also found it amusing that most journalists had no clue regarding the club and resorted to complete guesswork.

There seems to be a couple of reports tonight to suggest Roman has had quite a bit of interest and serious enquiries made around the 3bn figure. This could quite easily be a means to hurry through serious candidates but if it is indeed true and there are other offers that are being made in a much more discreet manner that immediately to me feels more comfortable than this media circus from these two.

[DDA 9,570]

1 hour ago, Superblue_1986 said:

This Swiss/American bid has been leaked so heavily through the media I already don't like it.

Whilst it was at times frustrating that the club act as a closed shop, there always felt so much more dignity and control over things and I also found it amusing that most journalists had no clue regarding the club and resorted to complete guesswork.

There seems to be a couple of reports tonight to suggest Roman has had quite a bit of interest and serious enquiries made around the 3bn figure. This could quite easily be a means to hurry through serious candidates but if it is indeed true and there are other offers that are being made in a much more discreet manner that immediately to me feels more comfortable than this media circus from these two.

Listen, things are about to change for us and it will never be the same as it is under Romans Reign. We better face the music and fast because this could become an extremely hard fall for us as fans... we have been soo lucky to live through the History Roman has given us. We all obviously hope it can continue under a new regime but let's face it.. it isn't going to happen unless we get a City type owner... and it looks asif there are none interested with such wealth.

[Pizy 17,860]

Many of these English pundits, journalists, and politicians just don’t seem to think that a person can change and evolve and that they ALWAYS have some ulterior motive even when trying to do good.

Someone has a shady, questionable past? They’re evil forever. Someone donates huge sums of money to charity? They’re just trying to launder their reputation. 

No matter how much genuine good Roman did off the pitch these people will never give him credit. It’s really pathetic. People can acknowledge that someone is problematic without treating them as though they are evil incarnate.

[DDA 9,570]

2 hours ago, Pizy said:

Many of these English pundits, journalists, and politicians just don’t seem to think that a person can change and evolve and that they ALWAYS have some ulterior motive even when trying to do good.

Someone has a shady, questionable past? They’re evil forever. Someone donates huge sums of money to charity? They’re just trying to launder their reputation. 

No matter how much genuine good Roman did off the pitch these people will never give him credit. It’s really pathetic. People can acknowledge that someone is problematic without treating them as though they are evil incarnate.

The World is spun by hypocrisy. It is common for man to stand on a mound of mistakes only to point the finger of those that others made. 

[cosmicway 1,252]

Marina going too she announced.

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

1 hour ago, DDA said:

The World is spun by hypocrisy. It is common for man to stand on a mound of mistakes only to point the finger of those that others made. 

Id like to think people learn from their mistakes. I noticed most massive anti war protests are in Germany and Italy. Maybe they feel some guilt from the past?

And yeah, speaking of hypocrisy:

 

[chelsea_4_eva 1,142]

When you've had an owner like Roman, everyone else feels like a dowgrade.

Also the hypocrisy and the media can just fuck off.

[Strike 6,961]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[OhForAGreavsie 5,775]

11 hours ago, Blues Forever said:

Their consortium giving me a bad vibes, seems like bunch of money hungry businessmans.

Are you talking about the consortium involving the Swiss banker Wyss? If so, I liked the interviews I've seen with Todd Boehly. He's an impressive bloke. He isn't Roman but we've been spoilt. We are never going to find another Roman.

Edited March 4, 2022 by OhForAGreavsie

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]