Buy-out bidder: exclusive interview

When did you first become interested in buying Blackburn Rovers?

It came totally out of the blue in March.

A guy I know was looking at Premier League clubs that might be for sale and Blackburn came up so that's when I became interested.

However, when he later pulled out, I remained interested and I've since got other people interested in coming on board.

What can you tell me about the third party who originally got you involved in the process? What was his background?

He came to me through my accountant and I didn't know too much about him, to be honest.

He was an American and his company was based in the same office as my accountant's.

I think he was just very, very opportunistic. I think he thought all these fellas are paying money for a Premiership club so I'll go and find some money, buy a Premiership club, and then put the two together and take a fee for it.

That's all I think he was about, but when we told him we didn't pay fees, we haven't seen sight or sound of him since.

What about the new consortium you are involved in? Who is part of that with you?

I can tell you it's all American and there's no other individuals involved other than myself.

I've looked on a few websites and people are talking about Paul Allen (the co-founder of Microsoft). But there's no other individual involved in our bid, it's financial institutions.

The one thing I think it's important to stress is there would be no debt going on the club as part of this deal.

Is it a case that you need the help of other backers to pull this off, or could you afford to fund a takeover bid for Rovers yourself?

I don't have £50 million in cash that is free and spare to invest in a football club so I would not be doing the whole thing myself.

So you are basically fronting a consortium?

Well, yes, if you like, although that also conjures up images that you can go to a phonebook and find someone to front a consortium.

I will be putting a significant amount of money into funding it, but it won't be the whole £50 million.

In the article in the Sunday People it said you were having to sell some investment groups to raise the cash. Is that correct?

No. That's one of the bits they got wrong.

Can you give me any indication as to how much you are worth personally?

I'd rather not at this stage.

If we get close to a deal then I might say more closer to the time. But right now, I've only had a meeting with the chairman so I don't think it's appropriate to reveal that information just yet.

What can you tell me about your business background? Is it right you started off with a recruitment business originally?

I have a company over here which is a fairly early, but well backed company, called Elite Graduate Jobs.

However, the bulk of our money is in the housing business, in a company called Princeton Global Housing. We've just signed our second contract, worth nearly a billion dollars, out in West Africa. We've just signed a $750m deal in Gabon for 15,000 houses.

So the main business is Princeton Global Housing and right now we have two contracts worth north of a billion dollars.

Is it true you are a Blackburn fan?

As a young lad I was a fan of Blackburn and Blackpool, and then I became more serious about it in my teens, around the time Jack Walker first got involved.

I was at the play-off game in 92 when Mike Newell scored at Wembley, and I've been a fan ever since.

I've always been an admirer of Blackburn, although I wasn't always enamoured with the style of football at times. But I think we've got an attractive product back out on the field again.

Last season I went to three games and I was at the FA Cup semi-final.

And I would definitely say that Blackburn is the number one passion in my life on a Sunday morning. I get the papers and go on the internet, and sometimes we even get the games on TV over here.

The People article also stated you made an opening offer for Rovers in March. Was that the case?

That's not strictly true.

It depends, I suppose, what you define as an offer. If you said to me 'I think my car's worth £50' and I say 'I think it's worth £30' then have I made an offer of £30?

Blackburn came to us with an idea of what they thought bids would be in the region of, and we said if we are to make then it will be in the region of....

A figure of £67 million has also been mentioned. Is that right?

That's not true.

But there's more to buying a football club than just cash up front. One of things we have said is if we do buy the club then a part of our bid would be to make money available for transfers, which might be how someone ended up at £67 million.

If we were to bid X and then add on X million for players, and another X million for the fees to get the deal done and everything else then it might be somewhere close to £67m, but it wouldn't be that exact number.

So any takeover would involve substantial funds being made available to the manager to spend in the transfer market?

Yes. The institutions we have who are interested in doing this deal - and they have to remain confidential until the very end if we do end up doing a deal - are very, very large investment institutions and you don't make an investment in a Premiership football club without being willing to dig into your pockets, and make money available to ensure the club does well in the Premiership.

Say we bought the club for £40m - not that that's the figure - and then said right go out and get us into Europe, we'd probably find ourselves in the Championship, and then League One after that (if we didn't then invest further).

If we bought the club then we wouldn't be putting Abramovich money into it, but we would make funds available as part of our package because the way you make a club valuable is by getting it in the top seven and Europe every year.

What else can you say about your future plans for the club? Where do you see it going long term?

We're not really at the point where we have long term plans.

What I will say is we don't have any experience of running a football club and the people who are already running Blackburn seem to be doing a damn good job of it, so the notion that we would come into the club with no other football experience other than being fans and be chairman, chief executive officer and vice chairman is nonsensical.

We would absolutely defer to those people who have been doing a great job for a while now. If this goes further down the line then we probably wouldn't make any major changes, I don't think.

What is the next step now in this process? How far off reaching the due diligence stage are you for instance?

We've got to make sure that there's value, and that we are comfortable with the idea of making a bid, and if we made a bid then it would be three weeks away at least, even if that was to happen.

Right now, the odds are it doesn't.

But if it were to come to fruition, I imagine you'd be looking at mid-July to make a bid, and then maybe six weeks after that to do due diligence, so something could happen by the start of the season.

You said 'the odds are' something will not happen. Does that mean you don't believe you will ultimately follow the process through?

That's just natural pessimism in terms of getting any deal done.

There's a company in Florida I'm currently trying to buy for less than a million and that's taken nearly four months to get that done. So when you are talking about buying a football club, whether it's for £40m or £60m, it's probably going to be a slower process than buying a million pound company.

Can you clarify the role Walter Hubert (the former Rovers director) has in your team?

Walter was in Blackburn when I came over with the original group of people who were interested in buying the club and I got to know him then. He's been a very knowledgeable source of information regarding the history of the club, and we've stayed in regular contact since then.

Back to the investment groups who are supporting you. What's in this for them? Are they just looking to make a quick profit?

That's something I've been very careful of and my judgement has been that the people I am dealing with are long-term people.

We've actually had a number of people approach us and say we'd like to be part of this deal, and we see a great opportunity in three years to turn around and make a big profit and sell out'. But that's been something we've tried to avoid.

We've tried to find investors that are in this for the long-term with us, and that see this being a long, long term process. There is a lot of ways that a football club can be attractive. One of them is to buy it, wait three years for the next Sky deal and then sell it to someone else, but that's something we are keen to avoid.

There are obviously assets in a football club, in the players and in the ground and things, and we are looking for a partner who isn't just in it to make a quick buck on them. We are looking for people who are in this for the medium and long term at least.

Ideally, I'd like to think we will do this with partners who are looking for a long-term stable investment, and I think that's something they could have at Blackburn.

The club is well managed, and the costs are kept within check. It's not a Microsoft where you are going to make 800 times your money back in five years, but it's a good, solid, stable investment for them.

And I suppose the better the club does on the pitch, the better that investment becomes?

Yes. But these aren't people who are going to spend £10 million on a player almost Abramovich-like. These are people who will say the club is worth a certain amount of money now, it's got a certain amount of profit every year, and if we were to buy a player that was more likely to help the team finish seventh rather than 10th then that would be something to look at.