) from Crawley Town, another story involving a shady source of financing for Premiership side Everton FC, Championship side Fulham FC and, in Spain's La Liga, Espanyol, the other footballing side from Barcelona. All 3 football clubs have something in common.
This report from Naked Capitalism shows that all three clubs received funding from a pyramid fraud going under the name of Power8.
The FA are supposed to have a fit and proper persons act that ensures clubs do not receive ill-gotton gains. Either:Back in January I enumerated the scam signs, adding:
Now, I’m definitely not saying that Power 8 is a Ponzi (I absolutely wouldn’t ever do that). But I certainly am saying that right now Power 8 looks to me, on the balance of the available information, exactly the way a fairly ambitious Ponzi would look.
Six months on, a number of new sources have come forward, and there’s more information. It’s also really obvious now that I was wrong: Power 8’s a pyramid fraud, not a Ponzi. Ponzis take a lot longer than six months to blow up, and Power 8 has blown up already, the way a pyramid would. Just the other day, some clumsy panicked slob deleted all the Power 8 web site content (last Google cache of the site here, dated 5th August).
a) the rules are not being enforced properly
b) the rules are not strict enough
OR, more likely
c) BOTH
In any case you have to wonder what the point of the FA is if hey can't do their job competently.
This is just a mirror image of other aspects of society where regulators have been consistently been found to be asleep at the wheel.