Your top 10 reads: sale of a football club, tax adviser raid and arrest, and Co-op Bank’s ATM mega-deal
TOP of this week’s pile was Thursday’s news that top entrepreneur Steve Morgan – who is the chairman of housebuilder Redrow – had sold football club Wolves to a Chinese business.
Morgan bought the club in 2007 for £10 on the condition he would then invest £30m. The deal, which completed for a reported £45m, sees him exit the club after close to a decade of ownership.
The Liverpool-born businessman, who now lives in Cheshire, is known to have been a lifelong Liverpool FC supporter and has made several unsuccessful attempts to take control of the club in the past and it has been suggested that his ownership of Wolves was his consolation prize.
But in an open letter to Wolves fans, published after the deal, he said: “My nine years at the Club have been an honour and a privilege that I will never forget.
“Sir Jack [Hayward] stated at the time that he was passing on the baton of ownership of this great Club to me and now it is my turn to pass on that baton to Fosun International Group.”
Another big story this week was the news that a tax adviser was arrested following a raid on his home in Cheshire and business premises in Manchester.
More than 30 officers from HMRC searched four residential addresses in the North West and Midlands as part of an HM Revenue and Customs investigation into a suspected £132m tax fraud.
Finally, some good news for the Co-operative Bank, as it stands to make £28m from selling its 3% stake in the payments company that runs the UK’s entire ATM and BACS clearing network.
A group of 18 banks, including the Co-operative Bank, own VocaLink but in February the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator ordered them to sell off the company.
The deal will see MasterCard buy 92% of VocaLink for £700m, with an additional earn-out of up to £169m if performance targets are met.
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Have a great weekend.
This week’s top 10:
