Newcastle Utd takeover was controlled by Mohammed bin Salman, leaked WhatsApps suggest
Messages from businesswoman Amanda Staveley claim Saudi Crown Prince pulled strings behind the scenes of controversial deal
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Gordon Rayner
Associate Editor
20 October 2024 5:00pm BST
Gordon Rayner
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, personally controlled the takeover of Newcastle United by the state’s sovereign wealth fund, leaked WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph suggest.
The messages from Amanda Staveley, who brokered the club’s sale by tycoon Mike Ashley to the Gulf Kingdom’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund (PIF), raise questions over guarantees made to the Premier League to secure the deal.
The cache of WhatsApps suggest the Crown Prince, who is Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, was signing off key decisions.
At one point, Ms Staveley warns the sellers that “the Crown Prince is losing patience”, and when the deal hit trouble, she said the governor of PIF was “trying to…convince the Crown Prince not to pull out”.
The messages shed new light on the extent of political involvement in the takeover.
Ms Staveley enlisted the help of the Saudi ambassador to the UK to rescue the deal, saying on Aug 6, 2020: “The UK Saudi ambassador spoke to the Crown Prince this morning.”
Later that month, she sent another message that read: “We need to update the Saudi Ambassador at 4pm as he needs to update the Crown Prince.”
In April 2021, Boris Johnson, then prime minister, said his government “was not involved at any point in the takeover talks on the sale of Newcastle” in a written parliamentary answer.
However, Ms Staveley was in direct contact with Lord Grimstone, then the minister for investment, and told the sellers of the club that the minister “pushed behind the scenes and made it very clear that their preference is for the deal to go ahead”.
The Premier League initially blocked the sale of Newcastle United to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund over concerns that the club would in reality be controlled by the Saudi state.
Via lawyers, Ms Staveley said she only ever referenced the Crown Prince in his capacity as chairman of PIF. To suggest that her messages cast doubt on whether the assurances about independence from the Saudi state have been adhered to subsequently “is as illogical as it is misconceived,” she added.
The sale eventually went through after the Premier League was given “legally binding assurances” that the Public Investment Fund (PIF) - which now owns 80 per cent of the club - was separate from the Saudi state.
Newcastle United supporters celebrate outside St James' Park after the sale of the club to a Saudi-led consortium was confirmed
Newcastle United supporters celebrate outside St James’ Park after the sale of the club to PIF was confirmed
The sale was highly controversial because of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. A CIA report concluded that the Crown Prince was responsible for ordering the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist, which was still fresh when the takeover was first proposed.
Foreign states are not banned from owning Premier League clubs under its own rules, but the Saudi state was accused of illegally pirating the League’s games on a state-run channel, which presented a barrier to ownership.
The Premier League eventually removed its objections after being convinced that PIF would be acting independently of the Saudi state in the running of Newcastle United.
While the Crown Prince is chairman of PIF, the Premier League said at the time it had “received legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club”.
Ms Staveley said at the time of the takeover that PIF was “an autonomous commercially driven investment fund”.
‘Repercussions’
The non-executive chairman of Newcastle United is Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of PIF, but the WhatsApp messages suggest it was the Crown Prince who had the ultimate say over the purchase.
On March 3, 2020, Ms Staveley told the Ashley camp: “The Crown Prince is losing patience – I need to assure him we will get there.”
On July 29 that same year, she messaged Mr Ashley’s team to say: “HE [His excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan] is trying to hang on to the deal and convince the Crown Prince not to pull out.”
But in October 2020, Ms Staveley had WhatsApped Mr Ashley’s team to say: “No10 can’t get any further involved than what they have done to date. Gerry [Lord Grimstone] said that they pushed behind the scenes and made it very clear that their preference is for the deal to go ahead, they are obviously very aware of the damage this has caused and the repercussions for future investments.”
The £305 million sale of Newcastle United went ahead in October 2021, with PIF owning 80 per cent of the club, Ms Staveley’s PCP Capital Partners owning 10 per cent and the property developers David and Simon Reuben owning 10 per cent.
Earlier this year, Ms Staveley, who had become the public face of Newcastle United, left the club after selling her shares.
Ms Staveley became the public face of Newcastle United, running the club with her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi, right
Amanda Staveley became the public face of Newcastle United, running the club with her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi, right
Lord Grimstone told The Telegraph that he kept abreast of large potential investments into the UK in his former role as investment minister, particularly those such as Newcastle United, which was in the public domain and “attracting a great deal of public interest”.
He added: “I made it very clear to Mr Hoffman that my only role was to facilitate the passing of ideas between the PIF and Premier League and that in no way did I seek to prejudice the Premier League’s complete autonomy in this matter.”
The Premier League declined to comment.
A spokesman for PIF said: “In October 2021, following a lengthy investigation, the Premier League announced that the sale of Newcastle United Football Club had completed following the receipt of assurances that the government of Saudi Arabia would not control the Club.
“The facts and circumstances that underpin those assurances, as confirmed at the time to the Premier League, remain unchanged.”
Ms Staveley said she was “entirely confident” that the assurances had been adhered to.
‘The Crown Prince is losing patience’: Messages reveal how faltering deal came close to collapse
In the vexed history of football club takeovers, few have been as controversial as the purchase of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Initially delayed by Premier League concerns that club would be controlled by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself, the deal eventually went through after “legally binding assurances” were given that this was not the case.
Leaked messages obtained by The Telegraph, however, have thrown that statement into doubt by revealing how closely involved Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi prime minister and de facto ruler, was in the progress of the deal.
The Crown Prince, known by his initials MbS, is the man accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident journalist who was strangled and dismembered by an assassination team in Turkey in 2018.
While Premier League clubs and fans were troubled by the possibility of one of England’s biggest football clubs being controlled by a foreign government with one of the world’s worst human rights records, the British government took the opposite view.
Eager to keep a strategic and economic ally happy, ministers in Boris Johnson’s government worked behind the scenes to make the deal happen.
They have always maintained that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) would operate independently of the Saudi government in running Newcastle, but WhatsApp messages sent by the woman who negotiated the deal show that the Crown Prince was regularly updated as to the progress of the deal.
News of Saudi Arabian interest in buying Newcastle United first emerged in March 2020 when it was reported that Amanda Staveley, who had previously been involved in the sale of Manchester City to an Abu Dhabi-based wealth fund, had approached the North East club as part of a group that also included Saudi Arabia’s PIF and the property billionaires Simon and David Reuben.
