Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich

In 2003, Abramovich was named Person of the Year by Expert, a Russian business magazine. He shared this title with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He is known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, an English Premier League football team, and for his wider involvement in European football.

Source: English Premier League, Chelsea F.C., Roman Abramovich information at wikipedia.org.

Mohamed Al-Fayed – Chairman of Fulham F.C. – English Premier League Football Club

Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed (Arabic: ???? ??? ?????? ?????) (born January 27, 1929) is an Egyptian businessman estimated to be worth £650 Million. Amongst his business interests are ownership of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge and the English Premiership football team Fulham Football Club. He relaunched the humour publication Punch in 1996 but it folded again in 2002.

He has two brothers; Ali Fayed and Salah Fayed. Since 1985 he has been married to Finnish socialite and former model Heini Wathén. Together they have four children (Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar) and two grandchildren (Delilah, from Jasmine, and Antonia, from Karim). A fifth child, Dodi, from Fayed’s first marriage, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, along with Diana, Princess of Wales and Henri Paul, the driver of the car and employee of the Fayed-owned Hôtel Ritz Paris.

Biography

Born in Bakos (?????), a neighbourhood in eastern Alexandria, Egypt, as the eldest son of an Egyptian primary school teacher, Fayed tried a number of jobs, from selling soft drinks on the streets of his home city as a child to working as a sewing machine salesman (where he earned just £1 per month).

He was married for two years to Samira Kashoggi (1954 – 1956). Fayed founded his own shipping company in Egypt before becoming a financial adviser to one of the world’s richest men, the then Sultan of Brunei Omar Ali Saifuddien III, in 1966.

He arrived in Britain in 1974 by car and added the Al- to his name, earning the Private Eye nickname “the Phoney Pharaoh”. He briefly joined the board of the mining conglomerate Lonrho in 1975 but left after a disagreement. In 1985, he married Wathén, his second wife.

In 1985, he and his brother Ali bought House of Fraser, a group that included the famous London store Harrods, for £615m. The Harrods deal was made under the nose of Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, the head of Lonrho. Rowland had been seeking to buy Harrods and took the Fayed brothers to a Department of Trade inquiry. The inquiry, involving one of the most bitter feuds in British business history, issued a 1990 report stating that the Fayed brothers had lied about their background and wealth. The bickering with Rowland continued when he accused them of stealing millions in jewels from his Harrods safe deposit box. Rowland died in 1998, and, without accepting responsibility, Fayed settled the dispute with a payment to his widow. (Al Fayed had been arrested during the dispute and sued the Metropolitan Police for false arrest in 2002. He lost the case.)

In 1994, House of Fraser went public, but Fayed retained private ownership of Harrods.

For years, Fayed unsuccessfully sought British citizenship. Both Labour and Conservative Home Secretaries repeatedly rejected his applications on the grounds that he was not of good character. He took the matter to court, but failed. It has been suggested that the feud with Rowland contributed to Fayed’s being refused British citizenship the first time.^[1]

Mohamed Fayed was involved in the cash for questions scandal, having offered money for questions in the commons to the Conservative MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith. Both left the government in disgrace.^[1] Fayed also revealed that the cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had stayed for free at the Ritz Hotel in Paris at the same time as a group of Saudi arms dealers leading to Aitken’s subsequent unsuccessful libel case and imprisonment for perjury.^[2] During this period Fayed was represented publicly by public relations expert Michael Cole.

In 2003, Fayed moved from Surrey, UK to Switzerland, alleging a breach in an agreement with the Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue Commissioners. In 2005, he moved back to Britain, saying that he “regards Britain as home”.

Source: Mohamed Al-Fayed, Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed,  Fulham F.C. Owner, Chairman of Fulham Football Club, English Premier League information at wikipedia.org

Early life
Al-Fahim was born in Dubai in 1977. From the age of eleven he worked in his father’s Orient Pharmacy after school. At the age eighteen he founded the “Sulaiman Al Fahim Group” which financed education and sports in the UAE. In 1998, when he was 21, he was left orphaned after his parents and younger brother were killed in a road traffic accident near Dubai Airport. Following this loss he moved to the United States.[2] There Al-Fahim received his MBA in Finance and Real Estate from Kogod School of Business of the American University in Washington DC.

Portsmouth
On 27 May 2009, it was reported that Al-Fahim had signed a deal to take over the English Premier League club Portsmouth. Owner Alexandre Gaydamak agreed a price of around £60 million, with the deal proposed to be completed by 28 July 2009. On 13 July the club’s website said that the due diligence part of the deal had been completed, Al-Fahim Asia Associates were conducting their final commercial assessment, and that a formal application for the “Fit and Proper Persons” test to the Premier League had been submitted. On 21 July, it was confirmed that Al-Fahim had passed the test and that an agreement in principle had been reached to sell the club with Al-Fahim joining the board as chairman. On 29 July, BBC Sport reported that the sales and purchase agreement needed to be finalised to close the transaction. However, on 19 August, the club’s website revealed that a new consortium led by the current club CEO Peter Storrie was negotiating over the purchase of the team, and that Al-Fahim may be a partner in the new consortium. On 26 August 2009 The News, confirmed that Sulaiman Al-Fahim was the new owner of Portsmouth F.C. having full control of the club.

Source: English Premier League Football Club, Portsmouth F.C., Sulaiman Al0Fahim Portsmouth Owner, Premier League information at wikipedia.com

Born in Little Lever.
Father of two.
Aged 56.
Son and daughter still live in Bolton.
Educated at Farnworth Grammar School

558th= richest man in Britain according to Sunday Times list with £60m. Shares his ranking with author Jackie Collins, motor racing guru Eddie Jordan and Cumbrian haulier Eddie Stobart.

Lives on the Isle of Man.
Awarded OBE for Services to Industry in 2000.
Underwent a heart bypass operation in 1996.
Donated £100,000 towards a new coronary care unit at the Royal Bolton Hospital.
Became a non executive director of Wanderers in 1999, the same year Sam Allardyce became manager.

Traces his support for Wanderers back to Nat Lofthouse and the FA Cup winners of 1958.
Executive chairman of the Strix Group, whose boast is that one of their products is used more than a billion times every day by approximately 20 per cent of world’s population.
The company manufactures a wide range of kettle controls, cordless interfaces, thermostats and water boiling elements. It has annual sales of £70m and employs more than 1,000 people.
Became the major shareholder of Burnden Leisure PLC in December 2003.

Source: Eddie Davies, Owner of Bolton Wanderers, a member of English Barclays Premier League Football Clubs information at manchestereveningnews.co.uk

Malcolm Irving Glazer (born May 25, 1928 in Rochester, New York) is an American businessman and sports-team owner. He is president and chief executive officer of First Allied Corporation, a holding company for his varied business interests, most notably in the food processing industry. He holds controlling stakes in England’s Manchester United Football Club and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a National Football League team located in western Florida, United States.

In May 2005, Glazer paid $1.47 billion for 28.7 percent of English Premier League football team Manchester United, following a nearly year-long takeover battle. The takeover was fiercely opposed by many fans of Manchester United, who organised themselves in the form of the independent Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (formerly Shareholders United), partly because the Glazer takeover saddled the club with a large debt (over $850m) and interest that comes with it (approx £60 million a year) but also due to many fans’ belief that the club should be in the hands of fans and not business men. The mainly match-going fans object to the escalating ticket prices at a time when the club receives more money than ever from TV and sponsorship deals. Supporters of Manchester United in other parts of the world, such as North America and the Far East, have, in relative terms, looked upon the transition in ownership with relative dispassion. Since the deal went through Malcolm Glazer himself has played little visible role at the club, which seems to be run mainly by his children, several of whom are club directors, while he is not. However, the club has been successful since his takeover and has continued spending large amounts of money to attract the best players to the club. The team has won two Premier League titles and in 2008 won the UEFA Champions League.

For the most part, the Glazer family has fulfilled their promise that they will not interfere too much with the daily business at United, leaving the business part of the club to David Gill, and allowing maximum freedom for Sir Alex in the sporting part of the club.

Source: For more information on Malcolm Irving Glazer, Manchester United owner, English Football, Barclays Premier League, visit wikipedia.org