HKSE Complaint

One of our chief aims at 1875 is to put pressure where it matters – in Hong Kong. On Wednesday evening, we launched details of our latest plan to our mailing list.

How does this plan work?

Something we learned a while back is that the easiest way to put pressure on Birmingham Sports Holdings and the owners is not to confront them directly, but to use authorities, rules and regulations to do it for you.

When the BCFC accounts came on Tuesday, there was mention of this issue with the EFL and the ground sale. These are really significant things to the football club and of course had to be in the accounts.

They also constitute a contingent liability and a significant transaction for BSH – yet neither of these things were mentioned in the BSH accounts despite occurring during the period the accounts were for.

This is a glaring omission as both are important news for any shareholder or would be investor. Because of this, we formulated a template letter to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to ask them to find out why the holding company omitted these details from their accounts

Why are we doing this?

We are doing this because we feel that it is absolutely vital that BSH are forced to act in a fiscally responsible manner in order to ensure that Birmingham City FC is safe. By bringing pressure to bear on the holding company and ultimately the owners, we want to force them to make BSH and BCFC more sustainable.

We know from past experience that the Stock Exchange will only get involved if pushed into doing so – but that when they are involved will keep asking questions until they are satisfied things are operating as they should.

As we see it, there are two potential outcomes and both are positive for us.

The first outcome is that the BSH board are forced to be more transparent in their dealings and more fiscally responsible. This will have a positive effect on the way the football club is run, which is good for everyone.

The second outcome is that if the BSH board don’t sort things out, the HKSE will start to bring pressure to bear on them – for example suspending trading in shares in the company. That would then put real pressure on the owners and maybe make them more amenable to selling up – and we know for a fact there are people willing to buy.

If you would like to get involved, please visit this page to see the template email and details of what to do.

If you have joined our mailing list and seem to be missing emails, you can whitelist (a good guide here) our email address, mail@1875.uk or search your junk/spam mailbox and mark the mail as “Not Junk”.

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