View from the Blue
Columnist: Lyndon Lloyd

Bill Kenwright: Breaks his silence to announce a potential influx of £20m of investment

It looked for a while as though the silence from Bill Kenwright and the deadlock in the boardroom that went with it would drag on well past the beginning of the season. If his emotional "call to arms" yesterday is anything to go by, David Moyes, along with the supporters, seemed to have steeled himself for the impasse to run for weeks.

However, with timing that was typical of the theatre impresario, Bill Kenwright chose the eve of the new season to announce that he has received formal confirmation of a proposal for £20m of new investment into Everton Football Club by way of a new share issue.

Fans have been speculating that the offer is in actual fact Bill's acceptance of the Gregg-Grantchester consortium's proposal, but given the bitter war of words that has been waged in the media since Gregg broke ranks with True Blue Holdings and demanded its dissolution, this is a highly unlikely scenario.

While it doesn't explicitly say as much, the announcement appears to suggest that Kenwright has spent his fortnight of silence and beyond locked in talks with potential investors and that he has finally been successful in pulling together a consortium to rival that proposed by Paul Gregg.

Rumours naturally suggest that Kenwright's friend, BHS billionnaire Philip Green, is the main contributor, while others raise American investors as potential financial backers as the Blues' Chairman islong believed to have been looking for interested parties across the Pond.

If the surprise statement, coming less than 48 hours before Everton's slender squad takes to the field against Champions Arsenal, does confirm Kenwright's success in finding a significant investment package to ease the club's debts it will represent a dramatic shift in the balance of power in the boardroom back in the Chairman's favour. For while Gregg may have been out-numbered by the alliance of Kenwright and Jon Woods on the Board, the Oxford-based leisure tycoon clearly held the upper hand thanks to an effective campaign to put forth his proposals in public through the media. Even with entrenched skepticism among the fans wary of allowing another Peter Johnson-type businessman to take control of the club, Kenwright's credibility and ability to continue at the helm was at a dangerously low ebb.

Seemingly discredited badly by his gaffe over the July 30th deadline that he denied ever existed — despite its publication on the club's official website — it seemed to be a matter of time before Kenwright's position became untenable and he had to accept the inevitable and dissolve True Blue, the company that holds 72% of Everton shares. Coming on the back of five years without being able to secure any new funds for the club, his intransigence in the face of Gregg's desire to dismantle TBH in order to allow new investment from outside backers had left Bill's stock with the Everton fans as low as it had ever been.

Now, however, it already appears as though popular opinion has swung back in Kenwright's favour even though precious little is known of the new proposal. Gregg's own statement welcoming the reconstitution of TBH's shares doesn't confirm that the company will be dissolved, and therefore doesn't offer any hint of whether Gregg's proposed financiers will still be interested in ploughing cash into the club given that their involvement seemed to depend on Kenwright standing down and leaving the Board completely. If the latter is true, it would seem to proclude any investment by Lord Grantchester whose differences with Kenwright are well documented. That would be a shame; if the hatchets could be buried, the amount of investment could be doubled and Everton's debt virtually wiped out.

As it is, the £20m offer currently on the table has, we assume, been accepted in principal by the Board and the official statement said that due diligence would commence on Monday and would be completed by the end of the week. That would provide for the almost immediate eradication of the club's overdraft and settlement of other outstanding debt to other clubs and could leave enough left over for David Moyes to spend on badly-needed reinforcements.

Despite Kenwright's Blue blood, however, many fans remain as cynical of Kenwright's revelation as they have been of Gregg. The fact is that we Evertonians have been let down so often and on so many fronts in recent years that we have trouble putting our faith in anything anyone says until we have absolute, rock-solid confirmation. That means that there are a lot people who will believe that this is just another trick of smoke and mirrors until proven otherwise.

Also at issue is Kenwright and the Board's ability to provide a constant stream of investment beyond this initial injection. Based on past evidence, the fans are rightly concerned that the club will be back in the same financial mess a year or two from now given that it is expected to lose around £10m in the next year. Kenwright hopes to recruit a new Chief Executive to start addressing the club's commercial and operational failings but the belief is that without a new stadium or a dramatic improvement in Everton's performance on the pitch to increase television and prize revenue, the club is going to require constant investment from outside sources until the wage bill is cleared of its highest earners and the debts are wiped out. Kenwright has until now been singularly unable to provide any outside investment or arrest the financial decline at Goodison, hence the reluctance of the supporters to get excited about this latest twist in the boardroom saga.

Taking the situation at face value — and from a positively naive perspective — if all parties are being truthful when they say that Everton's interests are paramount, they will bury their differences and the club stands to benefit from £35m in fresh investment that would transform its financial position almost overnight. The response of Gregg's consortium and Grantchester remains to be seen, as does the validity of Kenwright's announced counter-proposal, but the suggestion of progress in a situation that has been deadlocked for months will come as blessed relief as Moyes and his team embark on what will be a gruelling season.

Lyndon Lloyd

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