Birmingham City bust-up: What set the two camps at loggerheads
After Birmingham City co-owner David Sullivan wrote exclusively to the Birmingham Mail retracting the "rude, off-the-cuff remarks' he made against new owner Carson Yeung, Colin Tattum looks at the background of the bust-up.
SINCE David Sullivan and brothers David and Ralph Gold sold their combined majority shareholding to Carson Yeung in October, the old board and the new board have been at loggerheads.
Karren Brady’s £1 million “golden goodbye” and perks, signed-off by Sullivan and co before their departure, started the ball rolling and infuriated the Yeung camp, who put a block on it.
Yeung then called in crack criminal lawyers to go through the books again after being left with liabilities that could total £11 million.
And last week the West Midlands Police Economic Crime Team were given a dossier of the preliminary findings.
Sullivan and David Gold blasted back in public at the insinuations that they had been up to no good, and more claims and counter-claims followed from both sides.
These included disagreements over whether or not Yeung was allowed to perform adequate due diligence before completing the £81.5 million takeover and allegations that Brady smashed up a club computer destroying IP data.
Sullivan jibed that Yeung was a “hairdresser” trying to curry favour with supporters.
It brought a response from Yeung’s enforcer Peter Pannu that the new regime had never once described him as a “porn distributor or such funny names and mentioned how he made his money”.
Sullivan and David Gold have both disputed their resignations/removal as directors and paid themselves next year’s management consultant salaries, totalling £420,000.
Sullivan last week suggested that they all got together at his Essex mansion in Theydon Bois for a cup of tea to talk through matters.
