Ownership
Small Heath F.C. became a limited company in 1888; its first share issue was to the value of £650. The board was made up of local businessmen and dignitaries until 1965, when the club was sold to Clifford Coombs. By the mid-1980s the club was in financial trouble. Control passed from the Coombs family to former Walsall F.C. chairman Ken Wheldon, who cut costs, made redundancies, and sold off assets, including the club's training ground. Still unable to make the club pay, Wheldon sold it to the Kumar brothers, owners of a clothing chain. Debt was still increasing when matters came to a head; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) put the Kumars' businesses into receivership. The club continued in administration for four months until Sport Newspapers' proprietor David Sullivan bought the Kumars' 84% holding for £700,000 from BCCI's liquidator in March 1993. Birmingham City plc, of which the football club was a wholly owned subsidiary, was floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in 1997 with an issue of 15 million new shares, raising £7.5 million of new investment. It made a pre-tax profit of £4.3m in the year ending 31 August 2008.
In July 2007, Hong Kong-based businessman Carson Yeung, via the company Grandtop International Holdings Limited ("GIH"), which was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE), bought 29.9% of the company from its directors. He became the largest single shareholder, but his stated intention to take full control of the club came to nothing. In August 2009, GIH announced a cash offer of £1 per share for the plc, confirming that they had "received irrevocable undertakings" from directors to accept the offer in respect of approximately half the shares at issue. When acceptances took their holding past the 90% mark, GIH re-registered Birmingham City as a private company with effect from November 2009, and confirmed that the board of both the holding company and the club would comprise Yeung as club president, Vico Hui as chairman, and Michael Wiseman as vice-president. The holding company name was changed from Grandtop to Birmingham International Holdings (BIH) in December.
Yeung was arrested in June 2011 and charged with money-laundering, and trading in BIH shares was suspended. As of May 2011, he was still the largest single shareholder, with 26.3% of the shares at issue. Publication of financial results was repeatedly delayed, and failure to submit accounts for the 2010–11 season by a March 2012 deadline resulted in the Football League placing the club under a transfer embargo. As a result of issues arising from those accounts, which were published in June, Vico Hui resigned as chairman of both holding company and club.
In November, BIH announced to the HKSE that there were three potential buyers for the club, two in Hong Kong and one in the United Kingdom, the latter believed to be a group fronted by former Queens Park Rangers chairman Gianni Paladini, and that talks with one of the Hong Kong-based parties were at an advanced stage. According to the statement, the board accepted that football was a business different in kind from others in that "the aspirations of the fans need to be considered", and were looking for a new owner who could not only adequately recompense shareholders but also "take BCFC to the next level both in terms of their financial standing, business acumens and overall suitability".
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