Venky’s v Indian Government (a) - 25/3/2025 - Perennially Re-Arranged Challenge Match

[Dan]

  On 25/01/2024 at 11:24, Herbie6590 said:

A fan opinion piece written by our very own @J*B for your pleasure...

https://www.brfcs.com/magazine/articles/what's-wrong-at-rovers/487

Hope you enjoy...😉

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I thought it was only libellous if it wasn’t true? 😂

[tomphil]

I'd pay money to read the unedited version !

[lraC]

  On 25/01/2024 at 20:59, tomphil said:

Iv'e been saying for years on here, often to tinfoil accusations, that i firmly believe a bit of it goes elsewhere and that's why they are happy to plod on playing with the club.

To Indian tax authorities looking from outside 200 million for seemingly zero return nor prospering or growing of the football club, large income from sponsorship, players sales often turned down. Players leaving for nothing after investing in them, etc.

Well it could look like a form of money laundering couldn't it that's why it's not before time they should want to know where every penny has gone.

Not that i think they are that stupid but i remain convinced there was always a bit more to it than we'll ever know.

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I said it in an earlier post. Venky’s have stated in their court documentation, that they need to send the money to protect their investment. Unless every penny Rovers spend is accounted for, this could be crucial. We know statements like “I worked for nothing during the January transfer window and had the place rocking” is a highly suspicious statement and I suspect the person who made it was unlikely to have worked for nothing. Protecting the investment, when the funds being pumped in seem to have at least an element, disappearing somewhere is a dangerous thing to state, when you are also putting a bond up to ensure the funds are being used for the intentions stated,

The heat seems to be ramping up significantly, but there is plenty we don’t know still.?

[lraC]

  On 25/01/2024 at 23:21, tomphil said:

I'd pay money to read the unedited version !

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I’m sure Josh will remove the blacked out bits and send it to you, if you ask him. For your eyes only of course. 

Edited January 25, 2024 by lraC

[lraC]

https://sumsub.com/blog/3-stages-money-laundering/

Read the above carefully and with an open mind.

[lraC]

I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning it, but I think Glen was once offered money to back off and stay silent.

Assuming that would not have been recorded through the Rovers bank account or business accounts as hush money, I wonder where that would have come from?

If that’s one we know about, how many do we not? 

[Upside Down]

https://sumsub.com/blog/money-laundering-football/

[Dan]

  On 25/01/2024 at 23:43, lraC said:

I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning it, but I think Glen was once offered money to back off and stay silent.

Assuming that would not have been recorded through the Rovers bank account or business accounts as hush money, I wonder where that would have come from?

If that’s one we know about, how many do we not? 

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Either Kean or Anderson’s back pocket I imagine. They were both well rewarded for their ‘work’. 
 

 

There’s a lot of things that point to sinister going’s on. If everything was legit, then these things wouldn’t have happened. 
 

One day we may get the truth. 

[lraC]

  On 25/01/2024 at 23:51, Upside Down said:

https://sumsub.com/blog/money-laundering-football/

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Imagine if you were in a position to guarantee that your team would not score, or even register a shot on target. 

[Upside Down]

  On 26/01/2024 at 00:39, lraC said:

Imagine if you were in a position to guarantee that your team would not score, or even register a shot on target. 

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It's all wild conspiracy theories!

Forget about them being under investigation for financial fraud, that's just a coincidence.

Edited January 26, 2024 by Upside Down

[RoverDom]

I'd love them to be money laundering but I just don't see how it fits in this case. The £20million they send a season is presumably sat in their bank account already and ready to use and therefore already clean? Also I'm not sure how it gets back to them once it's gone through the club. 

[oldjamfan1]

  On 25/01/2024 at 23:11, lraC said:

The look on the face of the late great Ray Wilkins, after the Kean interview, was amazing. 

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He had just realised that he’d wasted his time buying a house in Wilpshire.

[lraC]

  On 26/01/2024 at 07:02, RoverDom said:

I'd love them to be money laundering but I just don't see how it fits in this case. The £20million they send a season is presumably sat in their bank account already and ready to use and therefore already clean? Also I'm not sure how it gets back to them once it's gone through the club. 

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Have a read of the link I posted a couple of pages ago. There are trillions laundered every year. There is a process called layering, which effectively is where dirty money is brought into the clean economy, under the guise of legitimate business, but the origin is far from legal. There are some clever people out there who find ways of doing these things and us mere mortals, just aren’t aware of it.

The money used to elevate Chelsea to their lofty heights over the last few years, is highly suspicious for starters. It is thought that proving ownership of lots of commercial property in major cities throughout the world is nigh on impossible.

Lots goes on under the radar. Proving it is another matter, hence the ED in India being involved.,

[lraC]

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/17/roman-abramovich-chelsea-world-beaters

[wilsdenrover]

  On 26/01/2024 at 07:02, RoverDom said:

I'd love them to be money laundering but I just don't see how it fits in this case. The £20million they send a season is presumably sat in their bank account already and ready to use and therefore already clean? Also I'm not sure how it gets back to them once it's gone through the club. 

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Does it really ever get to the club 🤔🤨

(I imagine it does but maybe that’s part of the investigation)

[Herbie6590]

  On 25/01/2024 at 23:21, tomphil said:

I'd pay money to read the unedited version !

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New Platinum Subscription offer incoming…😁

[philipl]

  On 25/01/2024 at 22:44, Dan said:

There must be some Indian journalists that have a chip on their shoulders regarding Venky’s. Those horrible cunts must have pissed plenty of people off down the years. 
 

 

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There are and I have spoken to some of them  but the Venky's are sufficiently wealthy and litigious to have frightened them all off/ had a word with the editor and got them re-assigned/ sacked.

[RoverDom]

  On 26/01/2024 at 07:38, lraC said:

Have a read of the link I posted a couple of pages ago. There are trillions laundered every year. There is a process called layering, which effectively is where dirty money is brought into the clean economy, under the guise of legitimate business, but the origin is far from legal. There are some clever people out there who find ways of doing these things and us mere mortals, just aren’t aware of it.

The money used to elevate Chelsea to their lofty heights over the last few years, is highly suspicious for starters. It is thought that proving ownership of lots of commercial property in major cities throughout the world is nigh on impossible.

Lots goes on under the radar. Proving it is another matter, hence the ED in India being involved.,

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Yeah I get the gist just don't get how it applies in this case. I'm not disagreeing I'd just like some meat on the bones / some theories. 

I would have thought they'd put 20m through one of their profitable overseas  companies by falsifying many sales and then take the money back as a clean 20m profit. This almost seems like the opposite in that they put 20m in in one chunk and it gets pissed away lots of random items of expenditure which I don't understand how it would get back to venkys

Unless as Wilsden said the money doesn't get to the club and sits in VLL but would that not require the whole club finance function and auditors being either complicit or negligent? 

If only we had a data dump from our accounting software, there's enough accountants / business savy people on here who could trawl through it and find something suspicious but unless you're either in the finance dept or on the audit team or a hacker, you'll never see it. 

[philipl]

I cannot see the 26m figure for the HMRC debt being correct.

Rovers make no profits so the debt will be 100% PAYE. 

We have a big payroll expenditure but we would have to be well into the third year of collecting PAYE and not sending it to HMRC for the accumulated debt to be 26m. Remember the HMRC debt up to October was represented to the Court in India as being cleared within the payment of 11.4m Venky's injection which the Court approved. That 11.4m did include a substantial disputed and very late payment to one or more agents so if that was being cleared down to zero, I cannot think for a moment the winding up-happy HMRC preferred creditor wasn't being settled in full.

More evidence the figure of 26m is incorrect is the Rovers audited accounts to June 2022 would have had to be showing a very significant unexplained liability which, without looking them up again, I have no recollection of being the case.

However, a 2.6m debt to HMRC as has been speculated on here would be completely in line with Rovers "managing" our cashflow and HMRC getting itchy and threatening winding up orders against the club again.

With regards to Ian posting about Company Directors' personal exposure in these circumstances, the Rovers directors should have been closeted with their personal lawyers as soon as that delay in the Indian Court hearing came through this week.

If they haven't, and having personally steered a company in perilous conditions after the parent companies of our two biggest customers went spectacularly bust within 6 weeks of each other, my free advice to the Rovers Directors is to call their lawyers now and start writing personal files documenting why the business is not trading illegally and updating why Rovers can continue trading with hard evidence every week.  

 

[philipl]

Being very careful how I word this.

When I met with Glen and the team in the House of Commons with MPs Nigel Evans, Jake Berry, Jack Straw and then Sports Minister Hugh Robertson, I floated the words "match fixing" and got a reply that I think shocked all of us.

The amounts staked on the Asian betting markets and illegal betting in India make a 20m a year loss look like a rounding error. 

I am no money laundering expert but I cannot see how Rovers is being used for money laundering and the utterly clumsy way the Neville Mansion and Balaji Birthday Party got mis-categorised suggests to me money laundering is absolutely not what is happening here.

As it happens, Declan Hill, with whom I was in contact when he was at Oxford University, posted this on his Linkedin yesterday:

Declan HillDeclan Hill • Associate Professor of Investigations, Author, Journalist - University of New HavenAssociate Professor of Investigations, Author, Journalist - University of New Haven

 

"In sport, corruption is normalized..."
An honour and privilege to be interviewed by the superb French journalist Patricia Cerinsek on bribery, corruption and criminality in sports.
She asked the fundamental question, "Why are so many athletes corrupting their sports?'

Three main reasons:

i. They are told to do so by their bosses. Il sistema/the system/cooperativa is alive and well in many sports leagues. To be a 'good professional' is to learn to lose as well as win.
ii. They are not paid their salaries. Non-payment of salaries is a chronic problem. If a player has not received their money in six months, what do you expect them to do?
iii. They are gambling addicts. There is a silent plague of addiction among athletes.

Very few people speak about these reasons, they have been influenced by the leagues, the bookmakers and the bosses. They are taught to frame the debate as an issue of 'ethics' and 'individual choice'... just like the tobacco industry bewitched academics/the public for decades.

 

[lraC]

Just to put a bit of perspective on the money laundering theory, there are all types of different scams that are either relatively straight forward or utterly baffling and complicated. Some involve relatively small amounts and some huge sums. The old adage something for nothing resonates a lot with me, as we all like that feeling I guess.

Someone posted on here a few weeks ago (I know who it is, but won't embarrass him) words to the effect, of what is the problem with a bit of mortgage fraud, when eluding to the purchase of Neville House.

Doing the job I do I am entitled to see some of the complex things that go on, that are not available to the general public, as it could give people ideas, but one of my favourites that is in the public domain is pasted below.

It perhaps beggars belief to some people, but I see very clever schemes being tried, almost every working day.

Man ‘shocked’ as house he owned for 30 years sold without his knowledge | The Independent

[RoverDom]

  On 26/01/2024 at 09:13, lraC said:

Doing the job I do 

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Out of interest are you allowed to say what that is? 

[lraC]

  On 26/01/2024 at 09:37, RoverDom said:

Out of interest are you allowed to say what that is? 

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Yes, I work in financial services as a mortgage broker/ company director. We are regulated by the financial conduct authority and have very strict money laundering guidelines to follow, which involve an annual test and proof on every client file, that we have a trail for any funds.

[J*B]

Pending message from the owners…

[Mattyblue]

‘We are committed to the club until the very end of time’… 

Which will of course lead to the standard ‘Thank god for them, we’d be fecked if they ever went’.

They play the fanbase like a fiddle.