Chronicle journalist Mark Douglas has shed some further light on Newcastle United’s proposed takeover from the Bin Zayed Group.
The Magpies have been heavily linked with a buyout from the Dubai-based consortium, but a lack of official information has led to fans looking to other clues as to what’s going on.
There has been a flurry of discussion over the club’s decision to strike several associated companies off the Companies House register, as reported by the Chronicle, but Douglas has suggested that it doesn’t indicate too much.
Instead, he has claimed that fans should be watching out for the activities of one company in particular.
Writing in a piece for the Chronicle, he said: “For those monitoring Companies House, it is St James’ Holdings that is the company which Mike Ashley sits as a director on.
“If there is movement around that, we are in the final throes of a takeover.
“But until then, the club continue to insist that however coincidental these moves appear, they are just routine ‘house keeping’.”
OPINION
This is another setback for Newcastle United fans, but at the very least they have a little bit of clarification on what they should be looking out for in the future. Clearly, United have to keep on trying to function as a club, regardless of if a takeover is in the works or not. That means that routine activities like this have to be carried out. Ordinarily, nobody would care in the slightest about something as boring and administrative as this, but the current climate of confusion and desperation means that people are jumping on the slightest thing that could be out of the norm and blowing it out of all proportion. The simple fact is that there will not be a resolution to this saga in the immediate future, but at least supporters know which company they need to be looking at when it comes to sifting through the jargon.