In August, Silvio
Berlusconi agreed to sell more than 99 per cent of AC Milan to a little-known
Chinese consortium named Sino-Europe Sports Investment Management Changxing.
The Chinese consortium that
agreed to buy AC Milan in a multi-million dollar deal this summer has been hit
with new forgery claims, local media said Friday.
The deal valued the club at
€740m (then $825.4m) including debt.
But the Chinese group
provided a forged bank statement to prove its financing abilities, China’s
respected business magazine Caixin reported.
The consortium provided a
statement issued by the Bank of Dongguan, a regional commercial lender based in
the southern province of Guangdong, saying it would provide assistance to
finance the deal.
But Bank of Dongguan denied
they ever provided such a document to the Chinese group, Caixin cited the
lender as saying.
The Chinese consortium
includes businessman Yonghong Li, the Haixia Capital group, and other private
and public Chinese companies.
Sino-Europe Sports
Investment Management Changxing Co has already paid €100m to Fininvest, the
holding company of AC Milan owner and president Berlusconi, who is expected to
sign off on the €740m deal by the end of the year.
The news comes just two
days after Bloomberg News alleged that other false documents were used in the
initial negotiations of the deal.
The Bloomberg report
claimed that Sino-Europe Sports provided documents on “what appears to be Bank
of Jiangsu Co. stationery, purporting to show transaction details of a
consortium member’s corporate account.”
It added that “after
reviewing the matter, Bank of Jiangsu found it hadn’t issued any such document
detailing the account’s transactions.”
Fininvest earlier told AFP
it could not confirm it had received the documents in the Bloomberg report,
adding, “we do not intend to comment on the affair.”
Bloomberg‘s claims,
reported widely in the Italian media, have cast a shadow over a deal that could
see Milan, one of the world’s legendary football clubs, following in the
footsteps of city rivals Inter Milan in being sold to Chinese investors.
Inter, Italy’s last
Champions League winners, in 2010, are now owned by the Chinese group Suning,
who bought a majority stake in the club several months ago from Indonesian
Erick Thohir.
AC Milan already pulled out
of one deal with Chinese investors last year, and recently the new bid was hit
by doubts.
No comments:
Post a Comment