Shameful
The public spat being carried out between Matt Southall and HE Tahnoon Nimer puts them both in a terrible and embarrassing light. Neither of them will come out of this well, and whilst the two individuals will have reputations damaged, perhaps infinitely, the biggest damage of all is to those that love the club, and those in the dressing room trying to save it from relegation against all the odds. All of us suckered in by the bullshit and lies.
Southall is a dead man walking, although apparently committed to still attending the CAST meeting tomorrow night. Mhmm, we’ll see. We’ll see if he makes it past lunchtime.
Southall was noticeably out of his depths in those early interviews. A chancer, a trickster, a fantasist. A failed businessman with a handful of Twitter followers up until the turn of the year. A football agent, who turned to Lee Roy Amiss, an estate agent. Known to those that have been going a few decades Amiss is a longstanding fan but he happily jumped on the bandwagon. He’d operated his own bandwagon’s before, but without any fame or fortune. A football agent and an estate agent…. what could go wrong.
We were all taken in by Southall, let’s be honest. We had questions, some more burning than others, but he was a good guy wasn’t he? A saviour, a communicator, A lifeline to better times. Yet, how did he ever get involved with the Abu Dhabi Business Development group? Football connections almost certainly, but where was the trust, the kinship, the bloody plan!
I have long studied ADBD since they came into our lives. The website is snazzy, but those companies and organizations shown are partnerships, business alliances. No obvious sign of the 60 companies that Nimer is said to run. I question Nimer’s wealth other than his link to the Private Office of H. H. Sheikh Saeed Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan.
Nimer appears to have plenty of time on his hands, and his use of social media, whilst the makings of a bestseller, is both tasteless and unsophisticated. Nimer does have a load more dirhams than Southall, that is obvious, but realistically he has to turn a big corner for us to trust him to take our club forward.
For the time being we are stuck with them both, and all of the other side characters. People are getting hurt, but no more than our beloved football club.
If you haven’t read today’s VOTV, it will throw some valuable light on this crazy situation.
Chicago Addick 
Once again we see the shady side of football…doesn’t anyone at CAFC do any checks before they take on board the bullshit words of the latest con artist?
You’d think!! As for the EFL. What a crock of shit that organization is.
What is happening at CAFC is symptomatic of what is rife in the business world these days where spivs and chancers are a common sight.
rierti – I don’t think that is any different to previous decades. Just these days they are more clandestine.
I have tended to let the corporate side of the fotball business wash by me in recent years – there’s so much dodginess in the game from payments to shady agents and third parties investing via proxies that I would advise anyone planning on investing in a FC to steer well clear.
I have tried to find out the names of the “60 plus” compnaies owned by ADBD and couldn’t find a single one – googling names and following leads lead me nowhere, in this era that’s strange as there’s usually an internet paper trail if you look hard enough. I suspect then that their money is based on the oil and gas sector in Abu Dhabi and probably they have put their money in companies wanting to invest in the region as a partner i.e. they can open doors, introduce people to each other etc and maybe their ownership is of low risk real estate such as offices and stuff relating to the country.
How Matt S got involved with Nimer is going to be a mystery we may never discover the answer to, I presume he’s good at being a frontman and spun a story to him – here was a great little business he would put in 35% and Nimer 65% so he was apparently risking his cash. Roland we know wanted out and sold the club for a nominal sum, retaining the freehold of the Valley etc with ESI taking on debts and running costs of the club. All MS needed was for TN to put some money in and get loan off a bank or a.n.other investor to fund his share and once Nimer’s cash was in the bank then it would mean that the business was both viable and the financing sound as it was banked by Gulf money. Then Roland gets his £50m for the freehold (or whatever it was), Nimer gets to be the owner of a football club and everyone’s happy. Only Matt S started spending money on consultancy fees, Range Rovers, an expensive London apartment and no doubt more. That rang a few alarm bells and Nimer who’s probably not as dumb as he looks starts asking questions and doesn’t get proper answers. Then we have the events of the last 48 hours.
Couldn’t have summed up any better myself CA. As you rightly allude to above, dodgy owners aren’t new to us. I wonder why we seem to attract them, and not our near neighbours in London. We cling to the hope that the rather tasteless one with the money wins, just to keep us afloat. Funny how your perspective changes; relegation doesn’t sound half as bad now, compared to extinction. My son goes to Hull, and then we are both scheduled to be at every game until the end of the season. Just hoping that the two rocks of moral decency, Bows and Jacko, can use the recent events to create a winning defiance in the squad.