Danny Fiszman lives in Geneva and it is now obvious he wants out.
In the second month of the season Arsene Wenger was saying that foreign ownership was bad.
On September 15 he warned about the dangers of foreign takeovers and said he would prefer Arsenal to be run by fans rather than by billionaires like Roman Abramovich.
He said: “It’s important for English clubs to continue to have English values. It should not just be a matter of who spends more but how we behave and how we achieve it. One of the charms of English football is that fans create the clubs and control them and owners are fans first and foremost. If someone offered me a transfer budget of £100million or the status quo, I would take the status quo.”
At that time, only Chelsea, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Portsmouth were foreign-owned.
Wenger said: “Arsenal is owned by Englishmen and they are fans of the club first and I find that reassuring.One day the players and I will go, but the owners will stay the same and they must transmit the values.”
Later on, in December, Wenger spoke again about foreign ownership on the day after West Ham’s Alan Pardew was sacked by the new Icelandic owners, and his position had softened. Indeed, he conceded that Arsenal might have to look abroad for investment if they got left behind. Wenger reckoned that if there were suddenly three or four Chelseas in the Premiership, Arsenal would be dead.
He said, “If today you go into football and think: ‘I have £100m available, I will put it into Arsenal Football Club and want to make £200m,’ it looks to me very dangerous, both for football and for the club,” he said. “If you say: ‘I have £100m and I want to enjoy it and be inside the club and help the club to develop’ it’s OK. But to find people who put £100m, £200m, £800m into a club and are prepared to lose their money, you must be lucky.”
Between September and December, something had changed. Maybe it was the AGM.
Maybe Arsene saw the writing on the wall when Danny Fiszman did not turn up to the AGM on October 19. It must have been weird for him to be on the stage with all the directors except the biggest shareholder. That had never happened before.
Some absences are significant, impossible to ignore. When the club announced the stadium funding was in place, at a press conference at Colney, David Dein was absent. For those who knew how Arsenal operated through the Eighties and Nineties, David Dein’s absence was massive and mind-boggling. It told us that Dein, who had run the club and hired George Graham as well as Arsene Wenger, was on the way out.We could not believe it. Dein knows a lot of the journalists and gets on well with them.
A strategic business brain like Danny Fiszman’s can easily figure out that Arsenal’s value, after moving to the Emirates, would be very high between 2006 and 2008.With Arsene Wenger in charge, working sensibly within his budget, the balance sheet would look tidy and attractive.
Today, if a new owner buys ITV’s shares, and Fiszman’s shares, the rest of the shareholders have to sell at a stated price. That is what takeover rules dictate.
As I’ve said before, this board needs a dynamic 40-something chief executive who can take the club to the next level. The board is old and tired, and they don’t get along. So it’s no fun for them. They own something worth £400 million but they are exhausted by the last four years.
None of them wants to be chairman, except David Dein, and the other directors will never allow that to happen.
Last week Fiszman sold 659 shares and on Matt Scott’s Guardian story on Tuesday pointed out that having under 25% means he can no longer veto proposed changes in the club’s statutes. Matt’s story also suggests that Fiszman will soon become a non-domicile, which reduces the capital gains tax he would pay on the sale of his shares.
What I’d like to know is : who bought those 659 shares? Was it one person or several?
PS : On Wednesday another 31 Arsenal shares were sold. The price was a record high of £6.215 per share. If you want to buy a share now the offer price is now £6,200.
Is this takeover activity ?