Post by Neko Bazu on May 17, 2007 8:38:38 GMT -1
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/sport/football.html?in_article_id=455153&in_page_id=1779
Oh, I just... words don't... he... it...
I cannot begin to put into words what I feel right now. What a worm. What a low, dirty, belly-crawling worm. What a tosser. What an utter cunting fuckwank bastard.
And to think this is the man who supposedly came to our club's rescue. As well as siphoning money out, he's now left us up shit creek without a paddle and with a hole in our kayak. And he had the fucking nerve to take a £650k golden handshake too!
So while he goes away with his pockets lined and free of any worries, we're now gonna be hauled up and punished because of his dirty dealings.
He fucked us over. Anally fucking invaded. If we get a fine, we're gonna be lucky to even have a club left - and with the points deduction that'll doubtless follow, we can forget any hope of bouncing straight back up.
And you Leeds boys thought you had it bad
Who wants to form a lynch mob?
Press release from Loyal Luton Supporters Club: www.loyalluton.com/
And from Trust in Luton: trustinluton.org/16may2007.aspx
Exposed: The Chairman who paid agents £150,000 in bungs
Ex-Luton chief Tomlins admits making illegal payments to middle men, even while his manager Mike Newell was declaring war on corruption
Football’s bung culture has been laid bare by an astonishing admission from a leading club chairman that he made a series of bogus payments to players’ agents.
Former Luton Town chairman Bill Tomlins made the remarkable confession in an interview with FA lawyers investigating the club, whose former manager, Mike Newell, claimed that corruption was rife throughout football.
Tomlins, who stood down last month, owned up to 13 separate illegal payments to seven named agents, amounting to more than £150,000, and disguised with cheques signed from an account outside the main club finances but not declared to the football authorities.
His revelations look certain to land Luton, relegated from the Championship, with either a massive fine or a points deduction, but they will also reopen the debate over the way clubs and agents break the rules to suck money out of the game.
They will also focus attention on the FA’s ability to police a multibillion pound industry, for Sportsmail can reveal that Luton’s club secretary Cherry Newbery presented football’s governing body with documentary evidence of the illegal payments 11 months ago — five months after Newell had first spoken out.
In the time it took the FA’s understaffed compliance unit to conduct their investigations, Tomlins made several more illegal payments to agents.
When Sportsmail confronted him at his riverside home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, he admitted: "Yes, I broke the rules, there’s no doubt about it, but I didn’t murder anyone or do anything illegal.
"I did wrong and it’s now up to the FA to decide what will happen. But, you’re right, I fall on my sword."
Astonishingly, his fellow directors allowed him to resign before he was pushed and he will walk away from the club with a golden handshake of at least £650,000.
And Tomlins, 60, told us that since leaving the club — and making his confessions to the FA — he has been approached by another Championship club to take over as chairman or chief executive officer.
"I can’t tell you which one because of the delicacy of what’s going on right now," he said.
Tomlins, a former second-hand car dealer, was interviewed in Luton’s boardroom by two investigators from the FA’s Financial Regulation Department in March and his taped confession runs to 37 pages.
He tried to justify the payments by saying Newell had made it impossible for the club to deal with agents because of constant rows over their commissions for signing players from other clubs or renegotiating existing contracts with players.
"Michael became a nightmare with agents," he told the FA. "I had to speak to agents directly — if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t get the player."
Tomlins claimed one agent became so frightened of Newell that he rang the chairman and told him: "Bill, forget it, for 15 grand I ain’t ******* gonna have that — you know, I don’t need it."
Recalling one row, Tomlins told the FA: "He [Newell] said to one agent, when I was in the room: 'You’re a ******* parasite, I’m coming round your house, finding out where you live and I’m gonna rip your ******* head off'."
Tomlins described his former manager as "a bloody maniac". He added: "You know, that man is evil. He was a nasty boy around the club — a bully."
He told how Newell had bitterly argued against selling one of his top players, Kevin Nicholls, to Leeds United for £700,000 in July last year, shouting: "I ******* run the football side. This is my ******* job not yours."
Tomlins demanded the club’s directors issue Newell with a written reprimand.
The payments admitted by Tomlins were:
● To Edwin Stein, representing Marcus Heikkinen, two unauthorised amounts totalling £25,000.
● To Sky Andrew, representing Ahmet Brkovic, three unauthorised payments totalling £37,500.
● To Imageview Agency (Mike Berry), representing Carlos Edwards, four unauthorised payments totalling £44,500.
● To Stellar Sports, representing Kevin Nicholls, one unauthorised payment of £7,500.
● To Treble B Sports (Andy Mills) representing Rowan Vine, one unauthorised payment of £10,000.
● To Direct Sports (Mark Curtis), representing Steve Howard, one unauthorised payment of £16,000
● To Key Sports (Steven Denos) representing Marlon Beresford, one unauthorised payment of £10,000.
During the often rambling confession Tomlins said he paid the seven agents amounts totalling £151,000 from a bank account controlled by a separate company, Jayten Ltd — a holding company for the football club — so that Newell would not be aware of the payments.
Jayten was set up in November 2003 to acquire the assets of the football club which, for the second time in a decade, had been in receivership.
The primary purpose of the holding company — run by four directors, including Tomlins — was to develop the club with a 25,000-seater stadium away from centre of the town.
Tomlins was first hired by the club in 1982 and performed a number of roles, including commercial director, before becoming chairman.
He admitted the unauthorised payments to the agents were agreed after the main deal had been done, telling the FA: "The way the agents work is talk about the deal, get the deal done, then they hit you about the fee."
In all the deals, Luton Town declared the details of the official transaction — as part of the FA rules governing transfers and re-signings — as well as legitimate payments to agents.
For example, in one of the unauthorised deals — to Imageview for the Edwards signing in 2005 — Luton officially declared a £51,000 payment to the agent.
But what was not declared were four other payments totalling a further £45,000 that were paid out by Tomlins, using Jayten accounts.
They were never declared to the football authorities — or to the main board of directors at the club.
Another time, during the re-signing of Howard — before his eventual transfer to Derby County — Luton declared to the FA a legitimate payment of £18,000 to the player’s agent, Curtis.
But Tomlins made what he called an undeclared "supplementary payment" of £16,000 to Curtis. Tomlins admitted: "It was seen and Newell went ape over it."
At one stage, one of the directors, former Fulham and Millwall player John Mitchell, discovered an invoice for £10,000 from Treble B Sports at his own private offices. It was for "consultancy fees".
When Mitchell queried the invoice with Tomlins he was told: "Silly sods — they’ve sent it to the wrong company. I’ll deal with it."
In 2004, soon after Tomlins rejoined Luton and after his appointment as chairman, he received an internal letter from club secretary Newbery.
It detailed how payments to an agent representing Dino Seremet — a little-known Slovenian goalkeeper who played only six games for the club — had been mishandled.
Newbery, widely respected within the game for her integrity, detailed how the method of payment was outside the FA guidelines.
Tomlins furiously ripped up the letter and told her: "I deal with these matters — not you."
Newbery, who has also provided lengthy statements to the FA, later began compiling her own private dossier of dodgy deals, gathering details from correspondence that crossed her desk.
In June last year — after Newell raised the spectre of bungs in the game — she contacted the FA to reveal her concerns and distance herself from any involvement.
By that stage the questions initially raised by Newell were also being asked at board level. And as part of the process of due diligence — to prepare the club for a possible takeover — financial examination disclosed the bogus payments.
During a heated board meeting Tomlins was ordered to confess to the FA and to detail every transaction.
In an interview with Sportsmail, he admitted: "The rules for dealing with payments to agents were poorly policed, so when it came to it, I telephoned the FA to tell them I had been making irregular payments.
"I know it was a breach of the rules but I thought I had reasonable grounds. I broke the rules, no question, from the time we went into the Championship. But, I’ll tell you, it was to avoid the rantings, the ragings and the bullying of the manager."
Tomlins said he did not reveal the details of the unauthorised payments to the club’s directors, although one of them, accountant Derek Peter, was a co-signatory on the 13 cheques.
Tomlins is to face further questioning by FA officials and, at that time, will provide details of his private bank accounts.
However, the gentle — and at times almost friendly — questioning of Tomlins by the two FA lawyers in March reveals a softly softly approach to a man who had admitted ignoring the rules.
One investigator asked Tomlins why he had recently come forward to volunteer his confession. The former chairman admitted he feared the truth would emerge from Newell’s action for wrongful dismissal.
He added: "What he will love will be another 'I told you so' — that’s how he operates."
Our revelations vindicate Newell, who is due back at the FA on Wednesday to give further evidence to the on-going inquiry into Luton and football bungs.
He was sacked by Luton two months ago and the club claimed he had been dismissed for gross misconduct after two written warnings about his frequent profanity and outspoken behaviour.
However, we can reveal he was dismissed less than 24 hours after handing a damning three-page letter to the club’s board of directors demanding answers to a number of uncomfortable questions including "irregular payments to agents" and the financial state of the club.
In his letter he asked: "Why has the club insisted from day one on dealing with and paying agents substantial sums of money for little or no contribution, sometimes against the rules and on several occasions against the wishes or even the knowledge of the manager?
"Why, having negotiated contracts with the players and their agents, was the manager not consulted about payments being made to agents?
"Has the club been warned by the FA about irregular payments to agents? Has the chairman, or any member of the board, benefited privately from these negotiations?
"Why did the chairman promise certain players and their agents extensions and improvements to their contracts without the consultation or knowledge of the manager? Is the club aware of the rule regarding agents and abiding by them?"
Currently out of football and preparing a legal case against his former employers — he was dismissed with more than three years left on a £400,000-a-year contract — Newell told Sportsmail: "I can’t say too much until the court case is finished although now this has come out, people will understand fully what my concerns were when I said what I did."
On Tuesday night, Berry, who represents Edwards, said: "When I did my transaction to take Carlos to Luton I agreed a £95,000 finder’s fee for bringing him to the club.
"There were, at the time, a number of other clubs chasing Carlos, so the way it was agreed I would be paid was £51,000 plus an enhancement.
"I asked Mike Newell about the total fee and he told me I’d have to go to see the chairman Bill Tomlins. The chairman said he wanted to pay me £51,000 from the Luton Town accounts and the balance through Jayten. I was concerned about this and rang my solicitor.
"I asked both Mike Newell and Bill Tomlins about Jayten and was told it was a holding company for Luton Town. I was not worried who paid me, just as long as I got paid.
"Mr Tomlins said he wanted to pay me the £45,000 over two or three years. The transaction went through and when Mike Newell left Luton he came to see me, and when I reminded him he had told me to go to see the chairman about the rest of the money, he said he couldn’t remember that.
"In terms of Jayten, the money has been paid, that’s my only concern. I filled in the forms required by the football authorities in relation to the fee of £51,000. Bill Tomlins said he wanted to pay the rest as a consultancy fee.
"I wasn’t happy with that and I wondered why the fee had been split like that. I spoke to my solicitor about it. I didn’t declare this amount to the authorities, but accepted it as a consultancy fee."
An FA spokesman said on Tuesday night: "We have an on-going investigation into financial irregularities at Luton and cannot comment on its progress at this time. Once we have all the necessary information we will decide what further action to take."
Ex-Luton chief Tomlins admits making illegal payments to middle men, even while his manager Mike Newell was declaring war on corruption
Football’s bung culture has been laid bare by an astonishing admission from a leading club chairman that he made a series of bogus payments to players’ agents.
Former Luton Town chairman Bill Tomlins made the remarkable confession in an interview with FA lawyers investigating the club, whose former manager, Mike Newell, claimed that corruption was rife throughout football.
Tomlins, who stood down last month, owned up to 13 separate illegal payments to seven named agents, amounting to more than £150,000, and disguised with cheques signed from an account outside the main club finances but not declared to the football authorities.
His revelations look certain to land Luton, relegated from the Championship, with either a massive fine or a points deduction, but they will also reopen the debate over the way clubs and agents break the rules to suck money out of the game.
They will also focus attention on the FA’s ability to police a multibillion pound industry, for Sportsmail can reveal that Luton’s club secretary Cherry Newbery presented football’s governing body with documentary evidence of the illegal payments 11 months ago — five months after Newell had first spoken out.
In the time it took the FA’s understaffed compliance unit to conduct their investigations, Tomlins made several more illegal payments to agents.
When Sportsmail confronted him at his riverside home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, he admitted: "Yes, I broke the rules, there’s no doubt about it, but I didn’t murder anyone or do anything illegal.
"I did wrong and it’s now up to the FA to decide what will happen. But, you’re right, I fall on my sword."
Astonishingly, his fellow directors allowed him to resign before he was pushed and he will walk away from the club with a golden handshake of at least £650,000.
And Tomlins, 60, told us that since leaving the club — and making his confessions to the FA — he has been approached by another Championship club to take over as chairman or chief executive officer.
"I can’t tell you which one because of the delicacy of what’s going on right now," he said.
Tomlins, a former second-hand car dealer, was interviewed in Luton’s boardroom by two investigators from the FA’s Financial Regulation Department in March and his taped confession runs to 37 pages.
He tried to justify the payments by saying Newell had made it impossible for the club to deal with agents because of constant rows over their commissions for signing players from other clubs or renegotiating existing contracts with players.
"Michael became a nightmare with agents," he told the FA. "I had to speak to agents directly — if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t get the player."
Tomlins claimed one agent became so frightened of Newell that he rang the chairman and told him: "Bill, forget it, for 15 grand I ain’t ******* gonna have that — you know, I don’t need it."
Recalling one row, Tomlins told the FA: "He [Newell] said to one agent, when I was in the room: 'You’re a ******* parasite, I’m coming round your house, finding out where you live and I’m gonna rip your ******* head off'."
Tomlins described his former manager as "a bloody maniac". He added: "You know, that man is evil. He was a nasty boy around the club — a bully."
He told how Newell had bitterly argued against selling one of his top players, Kevin Nicholls, to Leeds United for £700,000 in July last year, shouting: "I ******* run the football side. This is my ******* job not yours."
Tomlins demanded the club’s directors issue Newell with a written reprimand.
The payments admitted by Tomlins were:
● To Edwin Stein, representing Marcus Heikkinen, two unauthorised amounts totalling £25,000.
● To Sky Andrew, representing Ahmet Brkovic, three unauthorised payments totalling £37,500.
● To Imageview Agency (Mike Berry), representing Carlos Edwards, four unauthorised payments totalling £44,500.
● To Stellar Sports, representing Kevin Nicholls, one unauthorised payment of £7,500.
● To Treble B Sports (Andy Mills) representing Rowan Vine, one unauthorised payment of £10,000.
● To Direct Sports (Mark Curtis), representing Steve Howard, one unauthorised payment of £16,000
● To Key Sports (Steven Denos) representing Marlon Beresford, one unauthorised payment of £10,000.
During the often rambling confession Tomlins said he paid the seven agents amounts totalling £151,000 from a bank account controlled by a separate company, Jayten Ltd — a holding company for the football club — so that Newell would not be aware of the payments.
Jayten was set up in November 2003 to acquire the assets of the football club which, for the second time in a decade, had been in receivership.
The primary purpose of the holding company — run by four directors, including Tomlins — was to develop the club with a 25,000-seater stadium away from centre of the town.
Tomlins was first hired by the club in 1982 and performed a number of roles, including commercial director, before becoming chairman.
He admitted the unauthorised payments to the agents were agreed after the main deal had been done, telling the FA: "The way the agents work is talk about the deal, get the deal done, then they hit you about the fee."
In all the deals, Luton Town declared the details of the official transaction — as part of the FA rules governing transfers and re-signings — as well as legitimate payments to agents.
For example, in one of the unauthorised deals — to Imageview for the Edwards signing in 2005 — Luton officially declared a £51,000 payment to the agent.
But what was not declared were four other payments totalling a further £45,000 that were paid out by Tomlins, using Jayten accounts.
They were never declared to the football authorities — or to the main board of directors at the club.
Another time, during the re-signing of Howard — before his eventual transfer to Derby County — Luton declared to the FA a legitimate payment of £18,000 to the player’s agent, Curtis.
But Tomlins made what he called an undeclared "supplementary payment" of £16,000 to Curtis. Tomlins admitted: "It was seen and Newell went ape over it."
At one stage, one of the directors, former Fulham and Millwall player John Mitchell, discovered an invoice for £10,000 from Treble B Sports at his own private offices. It was for "consultancy fees".
When Mitchell queried the invoice with Tomlins he was told: "Silly sods — they’ve sent it to the wrong company. I’ll deal with it."
In 2004, soon after Tomlins rejoined Luton and after his appointment as chairman, he received an internal letter from club secretary Newbery.
It detailed how payments to an agent representing Dino Seremet — a little-known Slovenian goalkeeper who played only six games for the club — had been mishandled.
Newbery, widely respected within the game for her integrity, detailed how the method of payment was outside the FA guidelines.
Tomlins furiously ripped up the letter and told her: "I deal with these matters — not you."
Newbery, who has also provided lengthy statements to the FA, later began compiling her own private dossier of dodgy deals, gathering details from correspondence that crossed her desk.
In June last year — after Newell raised the spectre of bungs in the game — she contacted the FA to reveal her concerns and distance herself from any involvement.
By that stage the questions initially raised by Newell were also being asked at board level. And as part of the process of due diligence — to prepare the club for a possible takeover — financial examination disclosed the bogus payments.
During a heated board meeting Tomlins was ordered to confess to the FA and to detail every transaction.
In an interview with Sportsmail, he admitted: "The rules for dealing with payments to agents were poorly policed, so when it came to it, I telephoned the FA to tell them I had been making irregular payments.
"I know it was a breach of the rules but I thought I had reasonable grounds. I broke the rules, no question, from the time we went into the Championship. But, I’ll tell you, it was to avoid the rantings, the ragings and the bullying of the manager."
Tomlins said he did not reveal the details of the unauthorised payments to the club’s directors, although one of them, accountant Derek Peter, was a co-signatory on the 13 cheques.
Tomlins is to face further questioning by FA officials and, at that time, will provide details of his private bank accounts.
However, the gentle — and at times almost friendly — questioning of Tomlins by the two FA lawyers in March reveals a softly softly approach to a man who had admitted ignoring the rules.
One investigator asked Tomlins why he had recently come forward to volunteer his confession. The former chairman admitted he feared the truth would emerge from Newell’s action for wrongful dismissal.
He added: "What he will love will be another 'I told you so' — that’s how he operates."
Our revelations vindicate Newell, who is due back at the FA on Wednesday to give further evidence to the on-going inquiry into Luton and football bungs.
He was sacked by Luton two months ago and the club claimed he had been dismissed for gross misconduct after two written warnings about his frequent profanity and outspoken behaviour.
However, we can reveal he was dismissed less than 24 hours after handing a damning three-page letter to the club’s board of directors demanding answers to a number of uncomfortable questions including "irregular payments to agents" and the financial state of the club.
In his letter he asked: "Why has the club insisted from day one on dealing with and paying agents substantial sums of money for little or no contribution, sometimes against the rules and on several occasions against the wishes or even the knowledge of the manager?
"Why, having negotiated contracts with the players and their agents, was the manager not consulted about payments being made to agents?
"Has the club been warned by the FA about irregular payments to agents? Has the chairman, or any member of the board, benefited privately from these negotiations?
"Why did the chairman promise certain players and their agents extensions and improvements to their contracts without the consultation or knowledge of the manager? Is the club aware of the rule regarding agents and abiding by them?"
Currently out of football and preparing a legal case against his former employers — he was dismissed with more than three years left on a £400,000-a-year contract — Newell told Sportsmail: "I can’t say too much until the court case is finished although now this has come out, people will understand fully what my concerns were when I said what I did."
On Tuesday night, Berry, who represents Edwards, said: "When I did my transaction to take Carlos to Luton I agreed a £95,000 finder’s fee for bringing him to the club.
"There were, at the time, a number of other clubs chasing Carlos, so the way it was agreed I would be paid was £51,000 plus an enhancement.
"I asked Mike Newell about the total fee and he told me I’d have to go to see the chairman Bill Tomlins. The chairman said he wanted to pay me £51,000 from the Luton Town accounts and the balance through Jayten. I was concerned about this and rang my solicitor.
"I asked both Mike Newell and Bill Tomlins about Jayten and was told it was a holding company for Luton Town. I was not worried who paid me, just as long as I got paid.
"Mr Tomlins said he wanted to pay me the £45,000 over two or three years. The transaction went through and when Mike Newell left Luton he came to see me, and when I reminded him he had told me to go to see the chairman about the rest of the money, he said he couldn’t remember that.
"In terms of Jayten, the money has been paid, that’s my only concern. I filled in the forms required by the football authorities in relation to the fee of £51,000. Bill Tomlins said he wanted to pay the rest as a consultancy fee.
"I wasn’t happy with that and I wondered why the fee had been split like that. I spoke to my solicitor about it. I didn’t declare this amount to the authorities, but accepted it as a consultancy fee."
An FA spokesman said on Tuesday night: "We have an on-going investigation into financial irregularities at Luton and cannot comment on its progress at this time. Once we have all the necessary information we will decide what further action to take."
Oh, I just... words don't... he... it...
I cannot begin to put into words what I feel right now. What a worm. What a low, dirty, belly-crawling worm. What a tosser. What an utter cunting fuckwank bastard.
And to think this is the man who supposedly came to our club's rescue. As well as siphoning money out, he's now left us up shit creek without a paddle and with a hole in our kayak. And he had the fucking nerve to take a £650k golden handshake too!
So while he goes away with his pockets lined and free of any worries, we're now gonna be hauled up and punished because of his dirty dealings.He fucked us over. Anally fucking invaded. If we get a fine, we're gonna be lucky to even have a club left - and with the points deduction that'll doubtless follow, we can forget any hope of bouncing straight back up.
And you Leeds boys thought you had it bad
Who wants to form a lynch mob?
Press release from Loyal Luton Supporters Club: www.loyalluton.com/
And from Trust in Luton: trustinluton.org/16may2007.aspx
Relax a little fella!! Still, I guess this must be a pretty shitty thing to happen to your club - especially after this season 
One by one the penguins steal my sanity.
