Roman Abramovich cedes control of Chelsea FC to charitable foundation | Hacker News Reader

Roman Abramovich cedes control of Chelsea FC to charitable foundation

ft.com

35 pointssofixa11 comments

That's a shocking development. I wonder what he knows in order to preemptively cede control, he must be expecting worse than that.

> The move allows Abramovich to retain ownership of the club amid heavy scrutiny of ultra-rich oligarchs with ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. However, it means he relinquishes any control over club matters.

If FT's interpretation is correct, this does not sound so shocking. Managing the club was fun but oh well, might at least have the profits.

Here's the catch: EU countries can confiscate only properties officially registered to the Russian people involved, so there will be a rush by Russian oligarchs to find easy to control figureheads to whom register their most important properties, and many are already owned by figureheads.

The UK isn't part of the EU, though. Brexit and all that.

As usual, this legal trick "it's not mine now - it's my wife/son/friend" etc only passes when relevant regulator wants to look the other way. Most countries have laws against donations and transactions that are fraudulently done just to avoid the law.

And now, everybody looks.

There are no profits, the club owes him 1.5 billion ( most likely creative accounting, but still), and clubs at that level of that type ( vanity project with unlimited budget) aren't profitable.

It’s the seventh most valuable football club in the world, supposedly.

> In 2018 Chelsea announced a record after-tax profit of £62 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_F.C.#Ownership_and_fin...

That was exceptional, they also should have had decent profits in 2019 due to a transfer ban ( so they couldn't spend money on players), but since 2020 they've spent more than 250 million on new acquisitions, and will need to continue to do so ( they're going to lose more than half their defence this summer).

Viktor Kharitonin and Roman Abramovich are linked to the ownership of the Nurburgring race track. Both are on the sanctioned oligarchs list.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/30/politics/full-us-list-of-...

Viktor Kharitonin is #43, Abranovich is #2.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motorsport/russian-billio...

https://archive.is/dQXAL

"charitable foundation" is an euphemism for tax dodge, here used to secure investment in case someone gets an idea to confiscate Russian property in UK.

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