Salary fears for Charlton Athletic staff as coronavirus puts extra strain on funding for Championship campaign
richard@slpmedia.co.uk Tahnoon Nimer has won his boardroom battle with Matt Southall – but the impact of the coronavirus outbreak has left fresh funding fears for Charlton Athletic.
The Championship season will not resume until April 3 – at the earliest – as measures are taken to slow the spread of the virus.
There were already concerns amongst staff that the Addicks’ financial reserves would run out before the campaign finished.
Now the Addicks not only face a delay to the completion of their fixtures – if the season even ends – but also will receive no income from gate receipts for three weeks and still have staff salaries to pay.
At the time of our paper going to press, Syrian businessman Nimer had still not gained EFL approval for his takeover of Charlton Athletic.
The EFL issued a statement last week saying that East Street Investments’ takeover of the South London club still needed them to provide the source and sufficiency of funds – which has been the case since January.
It is thought that the latter means a sum of £17million being made accessible so that Charlton can cover running costs until June 2021.
On top of that there is also the “legal obligation” that ESI negotiated with Roland Duchatelet to buy the freehold of The Valley and the Sparrows Lane training ground. The full cost of the takeover is believed to exceed £60m.
Duchatelet has been contacted by the South London Press but the Belgian tycoon has not returned our calls.
There now looks to be no obstacles in the way of Nimer providing the final documentation after his dispute with Southall appeared to reach a conclusion on Thursday evening which has seen the executive chairman stay away from club property.
Nimer’s lawyer Chris Farnell was approached for comment but said his client was flying and that he would be unable to provide an update until today.
The EFL have placed Charlton under a “registration embargo” since January and that means that the club were not able to increase their expenditure in the latest transfer window.
They were only allowed to replace loan exits from the squad with temporary incomings.
Charlton dropped into the bottom three of the Championship after the last round of fixtures and will face a drop in revenue of more than £8m if they make an instant return to League One.
PICTURE BY PAUL EDWARDS
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Whilst I appreciate that the EFL have to satisfy themselves as to the funds etc, etc, it would be really nice for HE Tahnoon Nimer to make a positive statement, in addition to the one he made last week, as to whether he intends to start funding Charlton now that the excuse for not putting money in has been removed, ie Southall . I must say, like many others, I have my doubts as to his true intentions as this venture that he backed, appears to be in trouble. Two sayings come to mind regarding this situation – ‘put your money where your mouth is’ and ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’. I hope the former comes to fruition asap to save the football club that we all love, otherwise it will be the latter that may come into play and that would not be very nice !!