Oh dear.
It seems that poor little Sevco just can’t seem to catch a break financially.
After posting a loss of over £24m in their accounts back in November, many thought their financial woes were now eliminated after the selling of Nathan Paterson to Everton and their run to the Europa League Final.
But it seems like karma has caught up with their dodgy dealings, after The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have found them guilty of price fixing the sale of their replica shirts and doing their own supporters out of pocket.
A fine up to 10% of Sevco’s annual turnover is likely to be on the cards.
This is on top of the undisclosed fee they have just had to pay out Mike Ashley for their dodgy dealing on that front too, which I believe Phil wrote about today saying that figure alone paid out to Ashley could be around £15m.
It should be noted though, that JD Sports have apparently only set aside around £2m for the potential fine they expect to receive from CMA, whether that is just extremely wishful thinking on their part or whether they have some inside knowledge that they will only receive a small fine is unclear, but that is a company that literally makes billions of pounds a year, so a £2m fine would be the smallest slap on the wrist ever.
What may be different though is that it seems that Sevco were the orchestrators of this whole price fixing scandal, so the prices stayed as high in retail store as it did in their official club stores and online, so fans couldn’t go elsewhere to get their shirts cheaper, so CMA might be reluctant to only give them a slap on the wrist.
If the total bill is anything around the estimated amount stated below, it will pretty much wipe out Sevco’s earnings from their European run last season.
Beautiful.
