Be Careful What You Wish For (10 page)

By now I was completely pissed off. Paterson was standing in my way for no good reason that I could see. So I upped the ante. I instructed Andersen’s to phone Paterson to tell him that I wanted access and I was going to get it one way or another.

Up to now we had avoided the media but, given the complete wall we were running up against, we told Paterson that if he didn’t cooperate immediately, we would go to them and say how obstructive he was, how he was risking the future of the club and how if the club failed we would ensure he was held responsible through whatever means or authority it took.

Paterson came across as a belligerent individual, rotund in appearance, phlegmatic in conversation and seemed to revel in his fifteen minutes of fame as he presided over the future of CPFC. Regularly popping up in front of cameras resplendent in his Palace tie, he was intransigent. ‘Do what you want,’ was his response.

So I laid it bare to the media. I had the motivation, the means and the intent to buy this club and was being blocked by a fee-generating administrator who in my view could ruin the club.

This provided the pressure we needed. After an outcry from the
2,000-strong
Supporters’ Trust and the adverse media attention, I was reluctantly allowed access to do what turned out to be a very limited form of due diligence.

At this time, John Barton, 121’s MD and key driver in the purchase of PPS, invited me to the England v Brazil match at the old Wembley on 27 May 2000. I went along to ensure that I was well in touch with John as the sale was coming to its critical stage. Now that my interest in buying Crystal Palace was common knowledge, Barton attempted to use that information to his advantage by chipping the price of PPS down. He knew I would be buying Palace with money from the proceeds of the PPS sale, and I hadn’t yet agreed a final price.

During this game I met Theo Paphitis for the first time. He was big friends with John and was also the chairman of Millwall FC. He spent the entire afternoon saying it was madness to buy a football club. Perhaps it had slipped his mind that he himself had bought one, although Millwall can barely be described as a football club. He gave me his oracle-like view of football at the same time as ridiculing Palace as they were Millwall’s big south London rivals. It wasn’t the first time I heard Crystal Palace referred to as ‘Crippled Alice’, nor would it be the last.

Sometime at the end of May, Jerry Lim walked into my office in Slough. He was far from mysterious or mythical, in fact, he was a bit of a caricature. No joke – he looked and spoke like he had jumped off the set of a Charlie Chan movie. Just five minutes into the meeting I was struggling to take him seriously. He was an excitable little fellow with a pronounced accent and a rhetoric that would make a sailor blush – and that’s coming from me! He was going to ‘fluck this person up’, ‘fluck that person up’, he had ‘big flucking plans’, and ‘Won’ Noades was every flucking name under
the
sun – on this point we did agree. He was talking about building bowling alleys, nightclubs, multiplex cinemas and a luxury hotel. Quite where he thought he was going to build all this and quite why anyone would want a luxury hotel in an unglamorous suburb of south-east London seemed to have escaped him.

There was nothing about football – sorry, excuse me, he did touch upon it, advising me of his plans to bring his close personal friends the Gurkhas to be stewards at the club. I remain unconvinced to this day that he ever had the money to go through with this deal or even that Lim was his name.

And this was the guy that Paterson, the administrator at the club, was telling me was the reason I could not make a bid for Crystal Palace.

This made no sense to my advisers. Surely this stance didn’t stack up. Maybe I had missed something!

After wading through Lim’s initial claptrap, I suggested that perhaps I could buy the club and use him to work up the remainder of the deal. He jumped at that. I bloody knew it. As I thought, he had no money and I had just given him the out he needed. From that point he was my fiercest ally; smelling money and an earning opportunity, he snuggled up close to me. I also had the added benefit of having the Gurkhas as extra security if anyone ever threatened to kidnap me again.

It was now 20 June 2000 and the sale of PPS had been completed.

That evening I had drinks in the suite I had rented in the Dorchester. Arthur Andersen’s people, the ones who had sold PPS and the ones that were acting for me on the CPFC deal, joined me, along with my brother Dominic.

Charles Simpson of Andersen’s put pressure on me about doing this deal and all of a sudden, I felt like I was drowning.

My brain went into a meltdown. All the pressure of selling PPS came to the fore and within hours I was moving into another problematic high-pressured deal.

All my instincts said, ‘Don’t do it.’

I walked into the bedroom to get away from everyone. I had a deep sense of foreboding, and paced up and down the room muttering to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.’

I had worked myself into a bit of a state and was getting quite distressed when Dominic came in and was understandably concerned.

‘Jesus, Dom,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for this. I’m being pushed into something that I’m not sure about.’

‘Don’t do it, you haven’t got to do anything,’ he replied. ‘Just tell Andersen’s to piss off and stand down.’

I got myself together and we all went out to dinner at Daphne’s in London to celebrate the sale of PPS. The conversation turned to Palace and my brother got quite irritable with Andersen’s, indicating I was having second thoughts and that they should slow things down.

Overnight, despite the grave reservations I had, I changed my mind again. My father had told me once that buying Crystal Palace was my destiny, and his words were ringing in my ears. So, for want of a better expression I called myself out. I said to myself: ‘You have sold PPS, you need and want a new challenge, and here it is, son. What is the worst that can happen?’ Bloody understatement of the year right there!

So I committed myself mentally to this deal and the following morning informed Andersen’s that I would be proceeding with the purchase of CPFC.

I met Jerry Lim again, this time with Charles Simpson of Andersen’s in tow, who also scratched his head at this strange little character.
A
deal was agreed with Lim that I would buy CPFC 2000 Ltd, the company that had been set up by him to buy the club and take them out of administration. This was to be done in complete secrecy. Lim had negotiated all of the deal to date and I wanted him to complete the process on my behalf in the strictest confidence, whilst ensuring all aspects of the deal came as close to my satisfaction as possible.

One key area concerned me: the stadium. There was no way I was dealing with Noades. I knew he would try and take me like he had taken Goldberg. Ridiculously he demanded £12 million for a stadium that was actually valued nearer £6 million.

So, via Lim, I resisted the Goldberg trap of paying option fees on freehold purchases or ninety-nine-year leases, Instead, I opted for a ten-year lease, believing it would enable me to be fleet of foot if ever there came an opportunity to move to a purpose-built stadium in the borough. I was not going to let myself be taken in by Noades. I later said that I did not need to deal with Noades on the stadium – given that he was getting on I could deal with his estate. It wasn’t the most tactful remark, but in my view there was no dealing on a reasonable level with this man. Ironically the fact I only wanted a ten-year lease put me in breach of Football League rules after my first day of ownership, as you needed to have a minimum of ten years’ tenure, but, as I was to find out later, there was no surprise in the lack of diligence exhibited by the governing bodies of this business.

I wanted Lim to deliver these things for the money he was getting out of the deal. At the time I believed he had the deal in the best shape but later I was to find out that that was not in fact the case and certain parties, namely Noades, might not have received monies if I had had the time or opportunity of dealing with it myself.

The transaction was now ready according to Andersen’s, which
in
any other deal wouldn’t have been true: we had limited access and did limited due diligence purely because the drop-dead date from the Football League for the club to exit administration or face liquidation was virtually here. But I was in the deal now and I took what can only be described as a fly. By making this somewhat reckless call, I backed myself to have the means financially and logistically to make up for any parts of the deal that fell short.

I transferred the money for Lim to complete the deal on my behalf and also had legal documentation drawn up between Garrets, my lawyers, and Vincent Brown, who was representing Lim, that would transfer the ownership of CPFC 2000 from Lim to me immediately after he acquired it.

The completion meeting was set for 5 July 2000. The newspapers had phoned me to ascertain if I was out of the deal now that Lim had confirmed that he was buying CPFC. I played along, confirming that if Jerry Lim said that he was buying Crystal Palace Football Club, then he was buying it. I didn’t want the papers running stories that could potentially threaten the deal.

In those days there was no such thing as the, frankly laughable, fit and proper person test for ownership of a club as there is now. Not that it would have been an issue for me personally. But if those rules and regulations had been in place at the time it would have prevented me from doing the deal this way.

So with my money Jerry Lim would buy Crystal Palace Football Club and all its assets through his vehicle CPFC 2000 and no sooner was that done than I would buy CPFC 2000 from him.

What needed to be paid was the administrator’s sale price for the ownership of the club. I also had to put £1 million into the fully paid-up share capital, which was a requirement to get the Football League share, and then pay Lim his fee.

All in all I put £10,175,000 into Vincent Brown’s account held to my order and agreed to meet him on the morning of 5 July at the offices of Denton Wilde Sapte, the solicitors handling the legals for the administrator.

I was not invited to their party, so I crashed it.

On 5 July I met Charles Simpson and my lawyer Jeff McGeachie and we made our way to Denton’s.

We rocked up there and somehow or other Andersen’s got us into the floor where the signing was taking place. Just as I was about to enter the room flanked by my team, I walked straight into the irritating Paterson, the administrator. His face said it all but he still had to ask, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You’ll find out in a minute.’

It was clear that he knew from the moment I walked through the door why I was there, but he couldn’t help himself.

Over his shoulder was a room full of people. Lim’s lawyer was there and I made to go past Paterson into the room.

He blocked my path – as he was quite rotund this was not overly difficult for him. ‘You can’t go in there, the room’s full.’

‘You’re right, full of my bloody money. Now get out of the way,’ was my frosty response.

Pushing past him, I entered the packed room. Very quickly the penny dropped and everyone realised what was going on. Vincent Brown had just signed on behalf of Jerry Lim and he now signed everything across to me.

A Football League representative was there, a perplexed expression on his face. I would get to see that look on the faces of League officials many times over the years.

Andersen’s took over the show and within five minutes Crystal Palace had a new owner. Actually, in point of fact, it had two new
owners
in the space of those five minutes: one that lasted for approximately one hundred and twenty seconds, and yours truly.

Fifteen days after the protracted and difficult sale of PPS I was now the youngest owner of a football club in the world.

I was told the expectant management team of CPFC were sitting in another office waiting for Lim to come in and announce his purchase. They had been working with him for a long time on his takeover and clearly thought they were going to be part of a management buy-out and would be free to run the club in their own way whilst Lim ran around hatching his hare-brained schemes to build hotels and bowling alleys.

The silence in the room was palpable when I walked in and announced to Phil Alexander, Steve Coppell and Peter Morley – chief executive, first-team manager and acting chairman respectively – that I was now the owner of the club, thus dashing all their hopes.

Alexander, being the animal I know him now, disguised his disappointment and said, ‘Great, what do you want me to do?’

Steve Coppell just looked at me sullenly, although as I got to know him sullen was his normal expression, whether ecstatic or miserable.

And Peter Morley looked at me imperiously, remarking: ‘I guess you won’t be needing me any more.’ He was wrong in that and was later to become a great friend and ally.

I told them I was heading straight over to Selhurst Park to meet the staff and I would see them later. I would have loved to listen to their collective comments in their car on the way back to the ground.

The next morning would see the beginning of a new dawn and a complete change of culture for Crystal Palace FC.

6

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

SO WHAT HAD
the drive to rid myself of £10.5 million no sooner had I got my hands on it really bought me? Well, let’s find the right words. If some people’s palaces are luxurious and opulent, my Palace was a bloody toilet.

In August 1994 I had invested £15,000 and turned it into nigh on £80 million; here I had invested 700 times that amount not in a shiny new showroom and big new dreams, but at first glance a bloody eyesore fraught with problems.

As I sat in my office that first morning – and when I say ‘office’ it was a Portakabin, an actual Portakabin, a testament to the investment of previous owners – I looked out over the threadbare pitch and at the derelict building fraudulently passing itself off as a stadium, not quite with my head in my hands but certainly with some vigorous shakes of the old noggin. Had I bumped it a bit too hard when I had made the commitment to buy CPFC?