Everton takeover frontrunner is bid with new £350m loan against stadium - report

Andy Bell and George Downing’s bid to buy Everton is seen as the current frontrunner, and are the favoured option of supporters, according to Matt Slater.

The journalist reported via The Athletic’s website late on 8 June that while a new offer had gone into Farhad Moshiri, fronted by London-based business Vatche Manoukian, it was the pair of lifelong Evertonians who were leading the race.

Slater indicates that their bid to take control of the club is made up of a split between “fresh equity” and a new £350million loan secured against the new stadium which would “refinance the club’s existing debts”.

The loan would be provided by BDT & MSD Partners, the bank set up to invest the fortune of US billionaire Michael Dell.

Bell and Downing have already lent around £50m of their own money towards the construction of the Bramley-Moore Dock project as part of a group of lenders, along with now-rival bidders MSP Sports Capital, providing a total of £158m, a sum which 777 Partners’ were unable to pay back as part of their failed takeover bid.

Farhad Moshiri also has bids from MSP Sports Capital and Vatche Manoukian

It is little surprise that Bell and Downing would be seen as a popular choice among their fellow Evertonians when all that most fans want is the interests of the club to be put first.

Whatever Moshiri’s reasoning to enter into an exclusivity agreement with 777 and then prolong their doomed bid from September through to May there were enough red flags, which appear to have now been realised, to suggest it was not what the Toffees needed.

So the assumption is that as fans of the club they will be looking to work towards a sustainable future for Everton rather than simply use it as a vehicle for profit.

That is of course easier said than done, and Dell’s investment won’t likely be coming purely out of the goodness of his heart.

Bell and Downing have already put cash into the club to help it through the precarious past year, as have MSP Sports Capital, although 777 can also argue the same after providing somewhere around £200m of loans to keep the club running through the season.

It also won’t hurt that Downing in particular has personal links to the likes of Simon Jordan on talkSPORT (16 April) and Sky Sports’ Alan Myers (9 June).

But while a certain amount the view from the outside will come down to optics that won’t get their bid over the line alone and, as 777 found out, it is one thing to convince Moshiri that a course of action is a good idea and very much another to then convince the Premier League of the same.

In other Everton news, the Toffees are attempting to seal a major transfer arrival as quickly as possible amid daily talks.

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