Peace be with you

The 'main man' or Hong Kong Phooey?

The week's developments at St Andrew's have thrown up more questions than answers.

The story about Yeung's £70 million deal for Peace International Creation can be found here. Stick with it.

At present, Yeung still holds 16 per cent of Grandtop International Holdings, the firm that bought Blues. Vico Hui five per cent.

The deal for Peace International has not yet gone through therefore their holding companies, Winning Top and Genuine Ocean, remain on the outside looking in.

They could eventually hold a combined 42 per cent stake, if they fully exercise the convertible bonds set to be issued by Grandtop.

Now should the purchase of Peace International goes through, Yeung's shareholding would drop to nine per cent. The amount of public shareholders would fall from 79 per cent to 45 per cent.

So how can he be the man in charge?

It may be that the vendors are either linked to him in some way or run by close friends or business associates. People he trusts and are 'on-side'.

Everyone seems to suspect that there is a 'Mr Big', a mysterious zillionaire investor in the background and Yeung is just the front man. The so-called 'invisible hand'.

I'm not so sure that is necessarily the case.

It seems that that shareholders in Grandtop and business folk interested in what's happening at Blues are all inter-twined, like a spider's web, and there is no open dissention from anywhere about Yeung having all the limelight and driving things on.

Certainly, he's not behaving like he's a puppet. Witness the way he breezed into St Andrew's at his official unveiling, his aura, the deference of other board members
when he's around, his demonstrative passion in the directors' box during a game.

When I asked Peter Pannu various questions about the development, he immediately rang Yeung in Hong Kong and came back to me within half-an-hour or.

Presumably Yeung didn't have to run things by a shadowy background figure, sitting there in a secret hideout stroking a cat on his lap.

Pannu was quite forthright when insisting Yeung was the 'main man'. He referred to him as 'the boss'. He said he had just transferred £2 million of his own money as a 'top up' and January transfer plans remained on course.

Pannu stressed that Yeung said it was a strategic purchase to help Blues in the long term.

As for specifics, he wouldn't go into detail about these firms involved, who was behind them and so on. Answers were vague, as the new owners have been all along when myself and others have queried for information about backers and background.

As Peace International is a shell company and, like others in the Yeung empire, is offshore registered in the British Virgin Islands, it's nigh on impossible to find out their structure and raison d'être.

The business desk on the Birmingham Mail asked a leading city stockbroker to interpret all the documents concerning the proposed acquisition of Peace International and even he admitted he couldn't fathom it out.

Naturally, there is concern. It may be the Chinese way to be ultra-private, secretive. They may well do business in a different way than we are used to. But the less transparency, the greater the worry.

Yeung is getting stick from financial commentators out in the Far East primarily because they just aren't sure of his background, how he has become so wealthy so quickly and who's who in Grandtop.

The Premier League may well ask for a disclosure in the weeks to come and Yeung would have to provide that.

Throughout all of this one thing has remained constant: the calm and self-assurance of the Yeung camp.

Their air has been 'look, don't worry, we know what we're doing and the money's there'.

And despite the uproar about £11 million in liabilities, due diligence and police involvement, Yeung has not so much hinted at having had his fill of it already, or being the 'man of straw' David Gold once suggested he was.

Time will ultimately tell.