What’s The End Game With Lai?

[mickd1961]

Anyone?

[Barrera]

Knows he’s never going to get his money back. So strip as much cash out as he can .... then sell the bare bones ...

[kettering_baggie]

I don’t think that any of us can answer that, Mick, the runt himself probably doesn’t know. The clueless tw@t got himself into something that he didn’t understand, Chinese arrogance, now hasn’t the intelligence or good grace to bow out. The worry is of course, that he could try to flog off the stadium or other assets in order to try to save financial face.

FOL

[WBA1955]

He saw us as a good investment. You are a business man Mick and you know that you have to invest and put in time and effort before you can withdraw.
I can't understand why he bought us in the first place, especially for the price he paid.
First impressions are he wanted to own a football club as a toy, the ultimate accessory of a billionaire.
But he could have bought one much cheaper.
What I have always believed that with the club owning all the land up to the footbridge by the cricket club, and Lai being a developer, that was the honey trap that made him part with such a large sum.
He would have hoped to have made money from development and probably put a percentage back into the club.
But he had backers behind him who have since disappeared and left him holding the baby.
That's what I think anyway.
Any idea on what happened to his ventures in China using our name.
When I think of Lai I have always thought about Casablanca.
All the football clubs in all the towns in all the world...and he walks into ours.☹️

[soulman101]

To get as much money back has he can.
Which is going down as fast as a Bit Co!n

[mickd1961]

We were never an investment Des.

We were a bloody awful purchase at the price he paid.

The best you could hope for, even with investment and relative success is a 35,000 average gate and a club that will never have mass appeal and be a commercial “cash cow”.

Look at Wolves, they’ve done things really well in the last 7-8 years and are a seriously decent team with wealthy owners.

How many Wolves kits do you see on kids in Torquay, Cardiff and up north?

We were worth no more than a seasons Premier cash at best, circa £100m.

Only a moron would pay almost double that.


We found one.

[Dubbag]

The Communist Party in China moved the investment post shortly after he bought the club...he did invest in Chadli and some others that were also useless.....
The CP in China began advising against foreign investment abroad as they were beginning to understand that money was flowing out of the country and not coming back in....didn't like that.
Then just before the pandemic they started cracking down on tech industry bosses over in China itself around the time of the HONG KONG umbrella protest was going on...Occupy the heart of the business district for months..

Once the pandemic began the CP did what all governments around the world did...they curtailed peoples freedom to move around...In China they started throwing in jail business people.

No mistake...he is under pressure to return funds back to China and I suspect he has a limited time frame to get out....and yes it will be with a substantial loss but for now his plan is failing and actually, hard as it may seem....BUT the best thing that could happen to Albion....is that they continue this decline......
He may well go back to the recent offer he turned down and find it has also been lowered......thats why I asked about the parachute payment.....he may take that to cut his losses as part of his get out deal........

[Barrera]

If you look back over Lai’s reign ... you can see a pattern of bad advice, poor decisions and then grasping at straws to try to instantly correct things. When he started he invested quite lavishly and I remember the start of the 2018 season we were all salivating at the team we would put out. This quickly turned turned to s*** in just one season and thereafter started the decline. Williams and Goodman were sacked and then started the Manager Merry-go-round with some ridiculous decisions. Think Sham managing our final promotion push. Appointing Jenkins steadied the ship for a while. But when he saw the writing on the wall and quit, the appointment of Ken as CEO was just a complete joke and even Dowling moved on. The parade of Managers has made us a laughing stock. Paying £2m to free up Val and then put him on a 4 year contract followed by sacking him after 7 months was just senseless. Lai’s clearly in over his head and under massive pressure to sell .... but rather than cutting his losses and running .... I think he is just trying to claw back as much cash as he can presumably to save face. Fear is the club will be a skeleton of its former self when he eventually does sell - but for me that day cannot come quickly enough as we desperately need a new owner. Although being Albion we could easily jump out of the frying pan and into the fire .... there are some pretty dire football club owners out there ...

Have always thought that Lai was trying to curry favour with potential Saudi backers .... selling Hegazi and Pereira at cut price deals and rejecting Wilder because he criticised the Saudi owner at Blades ..... but who the **** knows ..

[baggieal]

Anyone?

Does he have a helicopter?

[BaggieSingh]

If you look back over Lai’s reign ... you can see a pattern of bad advice, poor decisions and then grasping at straws to try to instantly correct things. When he started he invested quite lavishly and I remember the start of the 2018 season we were all salivating at the team we would put out. This quickly turned turned to s*** in just one season and thereafter started the decline. Williams and Goodman were sacked and then started the Manager Merry-go-round with some ridiculous decisions. Think Sham managing our final promotion push. Appointing Jenkins steadied the ship for a while. But when he saw the writing on the wall and quit, the appointment of Ken as CEO was just a complete joke and even Dowling moved on. The parade of Managers has made us a laughing stock. Paying £2m to free up Val and then put him on a 4 year contract followed by sacking him after 7 months was just senseless. Lai’s clearly in over his head and under massive pressure to sell .... but rather than cutting his losses and running .... I think he is just trying to claw back as much cash as he can presumably to save face. Fear is the club will be a skeleton of its former self when he eventually does sell - but for me that day cannot come quickly enough as we desperately need a new owner. Although being Albion we could easily jump out of the frying pan and into the fire .... there are some pretty dire football club owners out there ...

Have always thought that Lai was trying to curry favour with potential Saudi backers .... selling Hegazi and Pereira at cut price deals and rejecting Wilder because he criticised the Saudi owner at Blades ..... but who the **** knows ..

That’s a really good shout re the Saudis
Didn’t pull that together at all
Right now I’d take Peace buying us back