777 Partners are reportedly locked in negotiations with another investment firm, Blue Owl Capital, over a £360m loan as the clock ticks towards a deadline by which they have to repay MSP Sports Capital.
As part of arrangement reached with MSP in December, 777 Partners have until Monday to repay all or most of the £158m that the former loaned to Everton last year to help fund part of the construction costs for the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock.
That stipulation is also one of the conditions that the Premier League has placed on approval of 777 Partners’ takeover bid which has now dragged on for seven months, and there were reports earlier this week that the Miami-based private equity company had written to the League to request an extension to the date by which they must repay MSP until the end of May.
With no indication thus far that either MSP or the Premier League are willing to extend the timeline for repayment be completed, Bloomberg report that 777 are in talks with Blue Owl, who claim to have $165bn in assets under management, over a sizeable loan secured against the stadium.
Those funds could , ordinarily, be used to make whole MSP Sports Capital, which includes Evertonian businessman Andy Bell and George Downing, place the required £60m into escrow and, potentially, complete the takeover once they have the green light from the League.
However, that would risk 777 going over the 65% borrowing limit imposed by the Premier League to prevent overly leveraged buyouts of member clubs.
777 co-founders Josh Wander and Steve Pasko have, in recent years, tapped funds from A-Cap, a financial services and insurance company based in New York, but the latter have begun to decouple from the former, starting with their exit from their relationship with subsidiary 777 Re.
In addition, regulators in the American states of Utah and South Carolina have urged A-Cap to reduce their exposure to the 777 Partners organisation as a whole, potentially ending that source of funds for Wander and Pasko.
The news of 777’s talks with Blue Owl Capital come amid a report from The Guardian that Everton’s huge loan from opaque off-shore lender Rights & Media Funding are costing the Club around £423,000 a week in interest payments.
It’s a measure of how deep the Club’s financial mess has become under majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri and the need for any new owner of the club to either consolidate or restructure the debt to reduce that burden of crippling interest payments.
Furthermore, figures for the sums paid to players’ agents for the 12 months from February 2023 to 2024 have been published, with Everton ranked 16th out of 20 clubs in that respect having paid £10.6m compared to the £75.1m shelled out by big-spending Chelsea.