The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

“After Wyness submitted employment tribunal papers, it was reported in The Times that Sir Philip
Green and Robert Earl raced across the Mediterranean in Green’s powerful yacht, Lionheart, to meet
with Wyness and reach a mutually agreeable compensation package,” wrote @watchedtoffee. “This
included the signing of a confidentiality agreement, one which has been adhered to by Wyness.”
Despite Everton Viral’s attempts to link Green to the club, Everton have always strenuously denied he
has any financial involvement at Goodison Park. “He’s not interested,” Kenwright told the Guardian
in 2011. “He would say to me [adopts a mockney accent]: ‘Bill, Bill, Bill, if I put facking money into
Everton Football Club you think Liverpool fans would buy from Topshop?’ He’s not interested. He’s
a total genius when it comes to money, he’s like Mozart is to music. He’s an adviser.”
However, the plot was about to thicken significantly. By the start of the 2011–12 season, Everton had
debts of more than £40m and faced the prospect of having to sell some of their better players to
balance the books. With banks unwilling to lend in the wake of the financial crash, Kenwright turned
to Vibrac to arrange a deal worth £14m a year, although they were to take out more than £80m in
loans over the next four years. Fulham also borrowed £16m, while Reading took out a £11.7m loan
for which they were later fined £30,000 for contravening Football League rules.
The £5.14bn deal for domestic television rights and more favourable relations with regulated lenders
have reduced the Premier League clubs’ reliance on mysterious offshore funding in recent years. Yet
Everton and West Ham – who took out a £27.8m loan with Vibrac in 2013 – borrowed an as yet
unspecified amount from a company called JG Funding in August 2015. A few days earlier, in an
article for The Sun, the club’s vice-chairman Karren Brady had defended Kenwright, who she met at
a dinner party at the home of the former prime minister Gordon Brown, against criticism from Everton
fans. Brady is also listed as a director of Taveta Investments, ranked as the second-largest operator in
the UK clothing retail market, and registered in Monaco under the name of Green’s wife, Tina.
As well as Green, two other names are consistently linked to the complicated web of companies. The
first – Graham Shear, a lawyer at the London-based Berwin Leighton Paisner who was involved in
Carlos Tevez’s move to Manchester United from West Ham in 2007 and was also briefly a vicepresident
of the mysterious Uruguayan Second Division club Deportivo Maldonado – acted for
Vibrac, JG Funding and a number of Isle of Man investment vehicles. When contacted by the
Guardian, he denied previously representing Green but welcomed the introduction of the new Premier
League regulations.
The other is Simon Groom, a British lawyer based in Monaco who represented offshore companies
registered in Panama, Geneva, Monaco, British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Man. He previously was
a director of a company called Balzane Services SA, which was used by Vibrac as a vehicle to
transfer “movable assets” through Switzerland between 2011 and 2014 before making loans to
football clubs. Balzane was also the intermediary in the buyout of substantial blocks of shares in the
pub company Mitchells & Butlers in 2009, which involved the racehorse magnates Michael Tabor,
Derrick Smith, JP McManus and John Magnier, as well as the Tottenham owner Joe Lewis.
Groom also signed off loans from two entities based in the Isle of Man to Rights and Media Funds
Limited on the same days as the loans with West Ham (10 August 2015) and Everton (14 August
2015) were charged. Kirkton Investments and Carroch Holdings both give the same London address