Talking of things you're unlikely to read in Trinity Mirror's titles, today's Guardian carried a piece by Andy Hunter, ironically once a Daily Post football correspondent, about the real cost of the George Gillett/Bill Hicks reign at Liverpool FC:
http://football.guardian.co.uk/championsleague200708/story/0,,2206007,00.html .
It turns out that Gillett & Hicks are seeking a £500m loan to finance the new stadiun at Stanley Park (the cost having spiralled to £400m), as well as refinancing the £298m loan they secured from the Royal Bank of Scotland with which to purchase the club. One paragraph, in particular, from Hunter's piece is both damning & daunting to the city's taxpayers, not just the club's fans:
"The Americans intended to borrow from Goldman Sachs in a deal arranged by Liverpool's financial advisor, Robert Tillis, until the financiers responded to the global credit crunch by asking the sports tycoons to invest more of their own money into the refinancing package. With his employers reluctant to do so, Tillis has held talks with other financial institutions, including Wachovia and Morgan Stanley. The deal is yet to be finalised but, given current interest rates, the Americans are likely to be refinancing under worse terms than they received from RBS."
As well as shining a light on murky & opaque dealings, the article makes mention of the credit crunch, a phenomenon which has brought the global banking system to a juddering halt, & which has shaken the traders on Wall St. out of their triumphalist mindset about global capitalism.
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