Minority Everton shareholders, who fear the recent takeover of the club has led to a dramatic collapse in the value of their shares, have had a request to meet the new owner, The Friedkin Group (TFG), rejected by interim CEO Colin Chong.
There are about 1,500 individual supporters who together own 7,912 shares, which before Everton were sold by Farhad Moshiri to TFG in December, amounted to 5% of the club.
Ian Kilbride, a lifelong fan of the club and businessman calculates that his own stake has dropped in value from £680,000 to about £35,000, based on the price of £3,400 he paid to increase his total number of shares to 200 in November.
That was the last time when shares were being privately traded at auction, for a median price of £3,400. But the £400M takeover of the club by TFG led to the creation of huge number of additional shares, increasing the total from 135,000 to more than 1.6 million.
This simple and seemingly arbitrary decision has decimated the value of the stake held by small shareholders to now less than 0.5%, leaving concerned fans estimating that each individual share has plummeted in value from £3,400 to as little as £175.
Kilbride, who has the support of former Everton director Cliff Finch and other minority shareholders who have made a significant investment in the club, met members of the Everton board on February 4 in the hope of securing an offer from TFG for their shares.
At the meeting, Kilbride asked Colin Chong, Everton’s interim Chief Executive Officer, if he could organise a meeting with TFG, led by American Dan Friedkin, to discuss the issue directly. However, Chong responded on February 11 by saying that TFG did not consider such a meeting necessary.
“I and others are now left with the feeling that more than 1,500 Evertonians, who are actually shareholders, are not worth a 30-minute meeting in the eyes of TFG,” Kilbride told The Times. “This is not a reasonable, sensible or, given the way the shareholder value has been destroyed, [an] honourable way to behave.”
Finch, who served as a director when Peter Johnson was Everton Chairman in the late 1990s, still has 50 shares in the club, despite selling some to Kilbride last year. Even now, he is staring at a potential loss of more than £130,000. Another supporter of Kilbride may have lost more than twice that amount.
“I am not so worried about myself, but the little guy has been cast aside here,” Finch said. “Morally, there should be an obligation here for the principal owners to do the right thing.”
According to the most recent documents, the estate of the late chairman, Bill Kenwright, is the biggest of the minority shareholders with 1,750 shares and facing potential losses of as much as £5M.