Featured image credit: Ben Sutherland/CC BY 2.0/Edited for size
The board of Yorkshire County Cricket Club has approved a takeover of the club by a consortium led by its former chairman Colin Graves.
Yorkshire announced the news in a brief statement posted last night (Wednesday), and the club confirmed today that an extraordinary general meeting will be held at Headingley Cricket Ground on February 2.
The EGM has been called to vote on one “special resolution”, which includes a number of changes to the rules of Yorkshire Cricket, which are required in relation to the refinancing proposal from Graves.
The board said it has accepted Graves’ offer to make the club financially sustainable and prioritise its focus on being the “most inclusive cricket club in the land”.
Yorkshire has been hit with financial difficulties following the fall-out from the high-profile Azeem Rafiq racism scandal two years ago. Headingley only retained its status as a venue for international matches after Yorkshire members passed three special resolutions in March 2022 as part of reform efforts following the scandal that enveloped the organisation.
Yorkshire has had substantial borrowings for a number of years and the club has an overdraft totalling nearly £17m (€19.8m/$21.6m), which is due for repayment by October 2024. Headingley will not be hosting a Test match this year and Yorkshire said it has needed to carefully manage its cash resources in order to pay its creditors as they fall due.
Yorkshire’s statement added: “A potential shortfall was forecast in late 2022 and the club immediately set to work seeking further working capital facilities to ensure it would be able to continue meeting its financial commitments. Since then, the board has been working to raise funds in order to meet its requirement for working capital and to refinance its longer-term debt.
“In order to assist with this, the club engaged professional advisers to approach lenders and potential investors worldwide, with a particular focus on the UK, the US, the Middle East and India.
“This refinancing process has been ongoing for over 12 months and has not been straightforward due to several factors including an adverse economic climate with high inflation and increasing interest rates, uncertainty over the costs of the widely publicised Cricket Disciplinary Commission investigation and resultant fines, as well as the backdrop of ongoing litigation and substantiated and unsubstantiated press reports. These factors resulted in many parties either declining to participate or withdrawing from negotiations out of fear of association with the club.”
Yorkshire said that many potential suitors were primarily interested in purchasing the club outright, thereby ending its member-owned society status. The club said it considered every offer while seeking to balance directors’ duties with the interests of creditors, members and employees.
Yorkshire added that the club and its advisors spoke to over 350 potential parties before entering into a period of exclusivity with the “one viable option” it had. The board completed the associated loan agreement during this exclusivity period.
It is proposed that Graves will be appointed to the board and then be elected as its chair, with a number of other directors to be appointed alongside him. These will include independent non-executive directors Philip Hodson, Sanjay Patel and Sanjeev Gandhi.
Graves will personally advance an unsecured loan of £1m to the club. Should the new directors be appointed to the board, they will work with the newly formed board to subsequently arrange further funding of up to £4m over a five-month period.
Graves was chair of Yorkshire from 2012 to 2015 and he has previously denied any knowledge of any racist behaviour during his tenure, while suggesting that some of the incidents were “banter”. Graves’ proposed return to Yorkshire has attracted criticism from Rafiq, who has urged sponsors to oppose the takeover.
In a statement released today, Graves said that “mistakes must be acknowledged and acted upon”.
He added: “I apologise personally and unreservedly to anyone who experienced any form of racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Discrimination or abuse based on race, ethnicity or any other protected characteristic is not and never will be acceptable.”
In November, it was reported that Yorkshire had agreed a £23m deal to sell Headingley to British businessman Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group. Ashley was said to have seen off competition from Graves to complete a sale and lease-back deal. Yorkshire did not specifically mention the sale of Headingley in today’s statement.
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