As I understand his personal wealth amounts to around £500 mill. Last season he was pumping 1 mill at month to keep the club going, and now we are in League 1 that probably means he will be putting in even more. So over the course of a season he burns through £40-50mill just keeping us running.
Player sales have possibly reduced that somewhat, but at the same time we have brought in a few in that were paid for.
If we dont go up this season, and theres no Lookmans to sell on to cover the even bigger losses surely he will be looking a LOT more then 1.5%.
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I would rather he sell now but if he won't, I hope he loses money until his eyes bleed.
£12,000,000 = 1.5%
£800,000,000 = 100%
RDs estimated worth = 1 billion euros (which is about £800m).
Of course that is an incredibly short sighted way of looking at it. Melexis is ticking along nicely, producing massive revenues and profits, so doesn't need much attention at all, whilst Charlton is losing money, revenues are down and direct involvement is demanded to reverse it's fortunes.
If you had £50,000 invested in something earning you 10% a year, ie £5,000; and another £50,000 in a savings account earning you .1%, ie £50.
What proportion of your "empire" would you say was the savings. To me the only sensible answer is 50% ie 50% of your total assets of £100,000.
To say it is less than 1% (£50 out of £5,050) and therefore is only worth 1% of your attention would be plain daft.
Apologies if this has already been aired previously but the 1.5% is such a harmful and dismissive comment it almost beggars belief. The unstated undertone is that RD considers himself to have far more important matters to attend to in his everyday business life than the 'minor' portfolio holdings at Charlton and that we (the fans) should recognise this--- illustrating yet again that he has no concept at all of what it actually means and what is entailed in being a fan rather than merely paying for a service (i.e. being a customer).
IMO it demonstrates graphically that as far as he is concerned nothing has changed and that Miere's statement in Dublin over a year ago that we (the customers) would have to get used to the way in which the major shareholder runs the club is as true now as it was then.
So, if any haven't yet got used to it (which I would venture is now the majority) then it seems that Duchatelet, and by extension Meire, are content that they should follow the advice of one of their own players (Johnson) and fuck off.
It is also not clear what is really meant when people say RD is "worth xxx amount". Does it include the value of his personal stake in Melexis? We tend to assume not. In which case RD has staked a good deal more than 1.5% of his personal fortune on his football venture. How is it going? Well, the Standard guys think he exited Standard with a profit for himself, (while leaving behind a club in a worse state than when he acquired it). What is for sure is that compared with Melexis it is nothing to boast about to his fellow "top" Belgian business counterparts.
You know, like Charlton to beat Crawley at home @ 200/1 that sort of thing.
This is key to understanding when the golden moment will be when he gives up and sells the club to hopefully a) a more constructive owner (let's not forget this isn't a given), and b) agrees to a sales price which reflects the significant impairment in value since he took over.
- if the rest of his business empire is very profitable, then Charlton represents a significant percentage of the overall offsetting losses that he is required to finance (even if it is de minimis from a percentage of turnover point of view). It's important to note that unlike most football clubs (which are perennially loss-making), most 'regular' businesses which suffer temporary losses can finance themselves in traditional ways (eg. debt issuance, equity offerings) or simply from cash on the balance sheet - with Charlton he is required to finance every penny of our operational losses;
- he has 'invested' approx. £40-50m in the club (through a combination of taking on some of the debt of previous owners, and ongoing operational losses) and this amount is growing at an accelerated pace (given our turnover is falling with a relatively fixed cost base, and threatens to fall to levels he can't possibly have imagined [League 2 anyone?]).
Moreover the equity value of his investment is almost certainly zero whilst no rational potential buyer would agree to take on anything like 100% of the current debt levels given the impairment of the club during his reign. He thus faces a vicious cycle of higher financing costs and lower exit value and quite simply he may a) not have the cashflow to continue down this path, and/or b) conclude that exiting now at a significant loss is the most logical strategy.
In short few fans can fathom his modus operandi but to suggest he doesn't care about the club is fanciful in my view.
I don't get the impression that Staprix was intended for football. I cant remember if I posted the documents back in Feb/March, they were just the bog standards accounts and company information though, I didn't try and dig in to them as I know very little about accounting - but the presence of another individual and quite an early date of incorporation did pique my interest.
It is conceivable that the current worth of Charlton really is a small percentage of all the empire in which he has a controlling interest. If you take his other personal wealth and the gross worth of the entities in his empire as £1.2 billion (Melexis alone is worth over £400 million, iirc), he could be placing a net value of £18 million on Charlton. The 1.5% maths would then work.
EDIT: the holding company for the electronics empire is called Xtrion NV.
When RD said the 1.5% comment, I assumed he was referring to turnover. So *if* Strapix is "worth" 800m, they'll pressumably have far more in turnover. Or actually, I can't even say that for certain as some value net income at revenue or gross profit.
Very curious to see what you come up with Prague.
To use an analogy, if your two main assets are a mortgage-free new build house which cost £225,000 and a car which cost £25,000, the car only represents 10% of your wealth. However if nothing goes wrong in the house (because it's brand new) but the car guzzles petrol and keeps conking out, then the car will become the much bigger problem from a cash flow perspective.
- when RD took money out of Standard Liege, was that transferred to Staprix's bank balance? After all, it looks like it may have helped pay for the purchase of other clubs.
- when RD lends money to CAFC, Carl Zeiss Jena, etc, does that take the form of loans from Staprix's account and the interest go there?
- it seems that Driesen was never on the Standard Liege payroll or the CAFC payroll. Does that mean he's an employee of Staprix? Ditto Fraeye while he was scouting for RD and not on the CAFC payroll? Or Luzon during the period between his removal from the firing line at Standard and his being sent to Charlton, when he was acting as a consultant elsewhere in the empire, I believe? Or are many of RD's henchmen and women directly employed by Staprix on a permanent basis?
- have any of the players been directly contracted to Staprix? This might constitute third party ownership by our rules, but not be seen as an issue elsewhere in Europe. The name Watt comes to mind.
There is a Tshirt there surly
It could be based on virtually any metric in order to make it correct, pick your metric (turnover, equity, value) and there is enough judgement to get to the number you first thought of.
It's a deliberately antagonistic comment.
You are worth naff all to me, and I don't really give a stuff (je m'en fou). You get all the attention from me you deserve and you should feel lucky. You have my delegates looking after your interests and, because I have selected them, they will come good despite the mistakes we may have made which we have learned from.
Katrien, my email begging for a job is on it's way.
A quick Google job on one article about it:
"Duchâtelet and his business partners, the couple Rudi De Winter and Françoise Chombar [the CEOs of X-Fab and Melexis, respectively], went shopping in the French winter sales. Through their company X-Fab, they have bought their French competitor, Altis. Cost: 9.2 million. That's no money, if you know Altis represents a turnover of 100 million euros with 965 employees. But the purchase is not so cheap. X-Fab undertakes to invest 60 million euros in the company, half immediately and the balance within four years. And the next five years must be at least 800 workers remain active in Altis.
Altis is like X-Fab, a producer of semiconductors. The French company was acquired in 2010 by the French Algerian Yazid Sabeg, head of the French high-tech company CS and ever Minister for Equal Opportunities under President Sarkozy. He thereby gained the support of the French industrialist Serge Dassault and the Qatari real estate fund Qatari Diar. But Altis was never profitable. This summer, the group was placed under judicial administration. Now strokes Duchâtelet and its partners there to win in the business from under the nose of two Chinese competitors who also were on Vinkenslag. The acquisition was effective on October 1, but was only now vented by Het Belang van Limburg. X-FAB is headquartered in Sint-Truiden. Both companies are highly complementary. X-Fab goes essentially to an increase in capacity. In 2018 Altis must be profitable again."
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Further evidence that he's not slowing down yet, dagnabbit.