Exposé questions where Tony Xia got funds to buy Aston Villa
The man who helped broker Tony Xia’s 2016 takeover at Villa has questioned how much of the money used to buy the club was actually that of the Chinese businessman.
Chris Samuelson spoke to undercover reporters during a TV documentary investigating how regulations surrounding the sale of clubs might be circumvented.
Xia bought Villa for £76.2million from Randy Lerner but two years later ran into financial difficulties and sold a majority stake to current owners, Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens, with the club on the brink of administration.
Samuelson, who was being filmed by undercover reporters from Al Jazeera, detailed how he had assisted Xia with the 2016 purchase of Villa, providing proof of funds in order for the EFL to ratify the deal.
“How much of that was his own money was a question mark,” Samuelson told the reporters. “How much of that was somebody else? I don’t know.”
Samuelson and his associate, Jamie Banfill, were briefly appointed directors of Villa’s holding company at Companies House in the summer of 2016 but had no official capacity at the club from September of that year onwards.
In the documentary, it is claimed Samuelson’s company Socfin was paid around £3million by Xia for its services, which included negotiating the transfer of an unnamed player.
“Tony Xia was very charming when I first met him,” Samuelson told the reporters. “But it went to his head and I am not sure how much was fact with him either. I’m not quite sure how much substance there is.”
Xia’s involvement at Villa ended in 2019 when Sawiris and Edens bought out the remainder of his shareholding. Later that year, Chinese authorities issued a warrant for his arrest and he was later detained on the charge of having failed to pay loans worth 30million US dollars.
The Al Jazeera documentary demonstrated how offshore trusts could be used to disguise criminal investors and get around the EFL’s owners and directors’ test.
Samuelson, described as an ‘offshore trust expert and football dealmaker’, had also helped to broker the 2012 sale of Reading to Anton Zingarevich and was involved in an earlier attempt to buy Everton.
In the documentary, he was approached by undercover reporters claiming to represent Mr X, a fictitious investor from China who had been convicted of bribery and money laundering. The reporters claimed Mr X had subsequently fled China after being sentenced to seven years in prison but had managed to smuggle money out of the country using casinos in Macau.
Responding to the documentary, which first aired on Monday, Samuelson’s lawyers say that he had never been told that Mr X had a criminal conviction for money laundering and bribery.
Had he known of any criminality, he would have ended discussions immediately, his lawyers said.
