Action for Albion building up China pressure

The fan pressure group have focused on raising the profile and awareness of concerns with the stewardship of absent controlling shareholder Guochuan Lai, who owns the significant interest in the Yunyi Guokai firm.

AFA's committee are looking into ways to make contact with what they claim to be a myriad of individual or group investors supporting Yunyi Guokai Sports Development's ownership.

"We'll be continuing to add pressure both politically and in media coverage," the group's founder Alistair Jones told the Express & Star.

"Potentially we might be looking to do things more China-facing, but that's difficult to do.

"We would like to potentially contact some investors within what we released recently. We're of the opinion that the investors may not have an idea of the serious position we're in, ie having to borrow £20million to continue to trade while still owed money from Guochuan Lai from a loan he took.

"We think it's the right thing to do, to notify the investors linked to Yunyi, to see if they know if this is happening. This is a possibility we're looking to explore."

The group recently produced and published a document featuring an ownership tree behind Lai's Yunyi Guokai firm.

They claim within it that several dozen private companies and groups, including investment groups, travel firms and more are all related to Yunyi's investment, which took control of Albion in 2016.

The group believe that the majority of the investment, 15.77 per cent, are Chinese state-owned assets.

Albion as a club are a subsidiary of WBA Group, of whom WBA Holdings control a significant 87.8 per cent of shares. The other 12 per cent are minority shareholders. WBA Holdings is a 100 per cent wholly subsidiary of Yunyi Gukai.

The group's claims regarding the ownership's investment gathered traction online, and Jones said: "If someone would've told us six months ago that a body of work we produced would be viewed 350,000 time we'd have thought you were mad.

"We're proud of where we've come but we will continue to work. It's not about any credit. The focus is on the club and the pyramid, working with Nicola Richards to get this independent regulator pushed through as quickly as we can, because football in this country needs fixing."