The Big Circle

Carson Yeung - Respectable Business Man


An article I had written for a well-known football magazine about the shenanigans at Birmingham City Football club has been spiked, on the grounds that almost none of it is publishable under Britain's draconian libel laws.

Oh well...

I'll just have to leave you with a collection of dots, and you can connect them as you see fit.

And if any Triad gangster is reading this and is considering fitting me out with a pair of concrete slippers - I take a size 45.

There are various incontrovertible dots you can find concerning the ownership of Birmingham City Football Club, I’ll leave you connect them as you see fit.

• Carson Yeung who owns 29% of B.I.H. (the holding company that ownes B.C.F.C.) was a moderately successful Kowloon hairdresser as late as the year 2000.

• He became wealthy after disappearing into Macau. Nobody in Hong Kong is clear as to how he became rich.

• He has now been charged with laundering money for Triad gangs, and his financial assets frozen.  His case is expected to come to a Hong Kong court in Autumn 2012.

• Another major shareholder may well be Chu Yuet Wah a.k.a. Pollyana Chu, possible the richest woman in China. She made her fortune in the Macau gambling industry.

• The Macau gambling industry is dominated by four Triad gangs – ‘14K’, ‘Wo On Lok’, ‘Wo Shong Wo’, and ‘The Big Circle Boys’. Privitization and de-regulation of the industry in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s lead to a ‘near monopoly’ on gambling operations in Macau by these gangs.

• In particular the ‘bate-ficha’ system of dead chip sales is dominated by Triads, as a useful method of laundering drug money.

• Angela Leong reports that it is impossible to operate a gambling concern in Macau without excellent relations with Triads, the Macau administration and Macau’s (notoriously corrupt) police force.

• For an exhaustive report on Macau gambling and it’s relationship with Triad gangs, download ‘The “BATE-FICHA” Business and Triads in Macau Casinos’ by Angela Veng Mei Leong. (Incidentally, perhaps coincidentally Ms. Leong is the fourth wife of Stanley Ho, who may also be a share-holder in B.I.H.)

• B.C.F.C’s C.F.O. Peter Pannu was a Hong Kong Police officer who was suspended from duty and charged with accepting a bribe from a local Triad gangster. However the charges were dropped after one of the witnesses in the case was shot dead, and the other decided against testifying after all.

B.I.H. have recently borrowed £6 million at 5% interest over two years, from a guy called Yang Yuetzhou and his British Virgin Isles based Inkhata Group. At the end of the period he will be able to take his cash and run, or 14% of the company's shares - making him the second biggest single share-holder, presuming nothing changes between now and then.

This effectively values the club at £42 million, or to put it another way, £40 million less than Carson Yeung paid for it in 2009.

Yang also owns a fan making factory in China, hopefully he will be able to make us a few extra and sell them some season tickets.

Now certain scurrilous bloggers have used these coincidental ‘facts’ to suggest that these fine upstanding business people are little more than puppets for Chinese organized crime. They further insinuate that therefore Birmingham City – a football club with a 136 year history - is today no more than a wholly owned subsidiary of a Triad gang - most likely the ‘Big Circle Boys’.

I couldn’t possible comment.

****

Light reading for anyone who cares.


www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/news/...mingham-City-FC.html

andersred.blogspot.com/2011/03/distant-s...-is-peter-pannu.html

swissramble.blogspot.com/search/label/Birmingham%20City

www.forbes.com/global/2011/0509/companie...rson-yeung-murk.html

Indeed

Keynes and von Hayek - Gangsta Rappers

'Post Racial' America

R.I.P. Runako Morton

Runako Morton dead in a automobile accident at age 34.


Maybe not the greatest talent to ever play the game, but he had a great spirit.

The Japanese call it KIAI (気合) - fighting spirit - and Runkao had fighting spirit in spades

Remember him this way...

Clueless Bill

Bill O'Reilly compares giving contraception to women is equivalent to giving heroin to addicts in Denmark.  Leaving aside the obvious logical fallacies of that statement, there is actually a bigger issue.

It's not Denmark, it's the Netherlands, and it's not heroin it's Methadone!

Other than that he got it bob on!

I lived in Amsterdam for 22 years, the methadone bus used to park just round the corner from my apartment on Tuesday mornings. The idea is that once you are a state registered heroin addict, you can be supplied with clean methadone, clean needles, clean syringes, and you don;t have to associate with gangsters to buy your stuff. It's also free, so you don't need to commit crime, or sell your body, to raise the money to buy more. (Research in Amsterdam shows that on average an untreated heroin addict commits 26 criminal acts per day!). Those on the register are then gently encouraged to enter into long-term treatment programs. I should also point out that Amsterdam only has an average of 2,500 heroin addicts at any one time, a far lower number (pro-rata) than almost any other major city in the western world, so this system does not encourage drug use.

So it's cheap, it's effective, it prevents the spread of HIV and reduces crime and prostitution.

Yep, I can see why Billo would hate it.

Ha!

From the consistently excellent Lenin's Tomb.

A joint statement from the Conservative Party and the conservative press posted by lenin

The government and the right-wing media would like it to be known that they are very disappointed with the lack of scruple, principle and resolve on the part of the capitalist class. In these difficult, austere times, it was incumbent on them to make very public, proud, ostentatious use of freebie labour, and to show class-wide unity in the offensive: not wilt under the slightest pressure from the Socialist Guardian BBC Bloody Trotskyspart General Strike Workers Party. 

The aforementioned parties have therefore decreed the following: 

1) it is a disgrace that a tiny party with no seats in parliament can make us look likely bloody idiots; 

2) of course, we don't look like idiots - they look like idiots, we look great, and we're winning (winning, winning, winning!); 

3) businesses have to stiffen their spines and stop pretending that they're embarrassed to be seen in public with us... yeah, well, does our face look bovvered?; 

4) you turn if you want to, Greggs, Tesco and the rest, but we're not for turning, unless you want us to. Do you want us to? Do you want some free money? We'll give you free money. Look, have Iain Duncan Smith's house, he doesn't need it, he sleeps in the fucking crypt.; 

5) it's not true that we're very unpopular. The SWP is very unpopular. We have written it in our columns, and said so on the television, and now everyone knows just how unpopular the SWP is.; 

6) the SWP is a tiny party, completely irrelevant, things would be perfectly okay if everyone would stop talking about the SWP.; 

7) the SWP has eaten our hamster.