Amanda Staveley has drawn up a loan agreement in the past week which allows one of her companies to borrow money from a firm owned by Jamie Reuben, her fellow minor shareholder in Newcastle United.
Sources close to Staveley insist the charge, which has been registered on Companies House, is not related to the £30.5 million needed for her 10 per cent stake in Newcastle and that she has funded her own part of the buyout. The explanation for the loan facility is that it is related to working capital that may be injected into the club.
A spokesman for Staveley said: “We don’t comment on private transactions between private companies.”
Reuben is one of three new club directors along with Staveley and Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund which now owns 80 per cent of Newcastle.
Filings at Companies House show that Cantervale Ltd, of which Staveley is the sole director, made a legal agreement on October 29 for a credit facility with RB Sports & Media Ltd, a company where Reuben is cited as the person with significant control.
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There is no time limit or amount of money put on the loan facility, and the latest filing says it is an amendment to an original “loan facility agreement” drawn up in April last year and amended on October 5, three days before the takeover, and then again last week.
Another of Staveley’s companies, PCP Capital Partners LLP, also arranged a “vendor loan” in April last year with Mike Ashley’s company St James Holdings Ltd, allowing borrowing of up to £150 million.
A vendor loan is typically an arrangement where the seller agrees to lend part of the purchase price to the buyer, but a spokesman for Staveley said PCP Capital Partners had not borrowed any money from St James Holdings under the arrangement.
Vaughan’s memory game
Michael Vaughan has strongly denied making a racially insensitive remark to three Asian cricketers during his time as Yorkshire captain, despite two of the players insisting he did so.
It is to be hoped the BBC analyst has better powers of recall than he did after an interview in 2007 about England’s ill-fated World Cup in the West Indies. Vaughan was reported by the interviewer to have referred to Andrew Flintoff as “Fredalo”, in reference to the all-rounder having to be rescued from a midnight pedalo escapade, prompting him to issue a statement insisting he “never used that word”.
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The Guardian responded by posting the audio of his interview online, in which Vaughan said “Fredalo” not once but twice.
A sense of Ballance
The hopeless Yorkshire investigation into Azeem Rafiq’s racism complaints even suggested the former off spinner might have faced disciplinary action for describing Gary Ballance as a “Zimbo guy”, even though “Zimbo” is widely seen as a non-offensive abbreviation for people from Zimbabwe similar to “Aussie” or “Kiwi”.
A simple google would have established that fact — indeed the cricket commentator and former Hampshire captain Mark Nicholas used the same term in a 2014 article when referring to Ballance and saying, “Play hard, party hard is a very Zimbo thing to do.”
American influence in Leeds
San Francisco 49ers own just under half the shares in Leeds United after increasing their stake from 37 to 44 per cent.
In January Paraag Marathe, the president of 49ers Enterprises, became Leeds’ vice-chairman and is taking a leading role in a revamp of the Elland Road stadium. Leeds said Andrea Radrizzani, the majority shareholder and chairman, remains “unequivocally committed to the club”.
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Pressing concern
UK Athletics is not providing any media officers to help out with press duties at next year’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, something that would usually happen.
The decision is based on the demands next summer when the Games, the World Championships and the European Championships are all taking place within a short space of time — and the World Junior Championships are on the same dates as Birmingham — but it means leading track and field stars may not have any familiar faces working with them.
