Evil Diaries: More Litigations

Farhad Moshiri lost hundreds of millions of pounds when he sold out of Everton. But he would have lost a lot more had he waited until the FA deducted ten points from their current position in the Premiership. Not all realise why and, if I may be forgiven, I offer the following by way of elucidation:

Most know that teams/clubs sign up to the FA’s rules for playing in the Premiership and that teams really have to try to win games since, roughly speaking, it is worth £1m when winning a game. What is not known by all is that at the outset of each season each club enters into contract with all the other clubs to abide by the rules not through a mere respect for the rules of the game but by way of contract. As a result clubs who feel that they were relegated as a result of Everton’s conduct and thereby suffered loss have a right in action against Everton. This is big money since relegation costs vastly reduced television fees issued by the FA in association with Sky and others. My learned friends are salivating at the prospect of sorting this out.

But that is not all: Manchester City might suffer a walloping deduction of points as a result of their conduct (or so it is alleged). This is retirement money for lawyers. Why Manchester City are odds on in the Betfair premiership betting for 23/24 is odd.

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The Dark Destroyer, Matthew Earl, is short of £13m worth of DarkTrace (DARK). He takes risks but he is not a gambler. Stay short.

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There is a surprising letter in today’s DTel (letters, top right) detailing the concerns expressed by a chap who inherited a small property company only eventually and very recently to find its account at Barclays closed with the request that the company transfer its affairs. This would be fine but for the fact that the company’s tenants cannot pay it rent until an account elsewhere is opened and the company cannot pay its contractors. Barclays have offered to pay out surplus funds through a cheque to the company when of course the company cannot currently bank it.

In the past I would have blamed the company presuming that its conduct is the cause of this rejection. But, post Natwest/Coutts, I think it rather more likely that the mad men in banking are at it again. We’ll see.

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I gave up holding my pension money at all, let alone merely at Curtis Banks, with SIPP trustees. This would be fine but for the fact that CB elected to withhold c. £4,000 for, it claimed, fees due to it by me. I have never agreed to any such withholding either in fact or as regards a specific sum. CB claims that I have. And therefore all this drags on after nine months or so of correspondence into the hands of the Financial Ombudsman Service. I reckon that if I owe CB anything under the head of claim adduced by them I have a counterclaim for breach of trust – since CB held themselves out to be trustees and then demonstrated to me that they are not to be trusted by me. Since I am 77 years old I would sooner not to have to attend to this.

Incidentally, it took me several months to get CB to put it to me that they had withheld my money on fee account. That is in itself deeply suspicious. CB have now seemingly sold out to an outfit styled Suffolk Life. I speculate that I am far from alone in pulling out. Certainly, other members of my family have had enough and are on the point of transferring their SIPP affairs where the fees proposed to be charged by the putative successors are about one third of those charged by CB.

CB try to dress up their performance by sending out what is essentially pointless marketing material which CB will claim contains valuable information. It is not valuable since CB knows, or can be presumed to know, little of the subject matter in hand. O what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.