Carlisle Utd's mystery ‘billionaire’ has been unmasked but so much mystery still remains in place

Yahya Kirdi , the mystery overseas “billionaire” who stalked the club for 650 bizarre days, did not, in the end, take over the Blues and launch what would have been a highly unpredictable new era.

United have moved in a different direction since then, financially involved now with the Edinburgh Woollen Mill and their actual billionaire boss, Philip Day. The divisive episode of the past two years is no more, other than the matter of confirming the former suitor’s identity officially.

Carlisle and their official supporters’ club (CUOSC) still cannot do that, bound by non-disclosure agreements signed in the latter stages of the saga. Yet a picture can still be pieced together, both through sources and a little time spent looking into what is publicly known about Kirdi.

The bones of the United story are that Kirdi was represented in talks with the Blues by Nick McCreery , a north east-based agent and son of the former Carlisle boss David McCreery, and who is believed to have been at the Newcastle meeting in February when Kirdi made his formal offer to Carlisle’s owners.

This certainly tallied with suggestions made early and throughout the story that the agent was someone known to United chairman Andrew Jenkins. As well as the family connection, Carlisle have also done previous business with McCreery’s Newcastle-based agency, Catalyst4Soccer, notably with last summer’s signing of goalkeeper Max Crocombe and their representation of youth player Kieron Olsen.

A Catalyst academy team also visited the club last autumn to play against United’s under-18 side. This was in the period when the overseas investor is said to have met members of the club’s hierarchy for the first time – and also taken in a youth match.

McCreery’s company has been running since 2013, established as Catalyst4Limited, though it was only in February this year that Catalyst4Soccer was incorporated as a private limited company – and with a Cumbrian address, at the Penrith 40 Business Park.

By this time, the “billionaire” saga was approaching its conclusion, which formally came on February 27 when the club announced the end of negotiations. Since then, more hints at Catalyst’s links with Kirdi have emerged, not least when David McCreery last week tweeted an article about talks in Dubai and Sharjah between “prominent Montreal/Gulf based businessman Yahya Kirdi”, his Royal Highness Sheikh Saeed al Qasimi, and Ken Beattie, owner of Cramlington-based firm Techflow Marine, which specialises in products for the offshore oil and gas and marine industries.

These talks were reportedly brokered by Newcastle and Sharjah-based company Newminster Group - of which Nick McCreery is a director. The article, which referenced Kirdi’s attempted takeover of Liverpool in 2010, said his “expertise and knowledge of the market” would help open business opportunities in the Middle East, Gulf and North America.

“In addition,” the article claimed, “plans are in place to bring an inaugural high-profile humanitarian event to Newcastle/Gateshead in 2017.”

The piece certainly sets out Kirdi as a high-flier and, while Twitter is not everything, one could not help but be drawn to the account @YahyaKirdi in light of his supposed status. This is significantly less dramatic; a protected account which has just 44 followers. One of them is Catalyst4Soccer.

It is interesting to compare the difference in profile of several other activities. While Kirdi did not appear to want anyone to know about his courting of United, his attempt to seize Liverpool seven years ago was certainly no secret. Rivalling Chinese businessman Kenneth Huang for the Anfield club, his interest became widely known in the period before Liverpool were sold to the America-based Fenway Sports Group, with Kirdi quoted in several media interviews at that time.

Traces of Kirdi’s business activity around this period exist in Canadian records. During his Liverpool pursuit, for instance, some of his public comments were made through a management corporation of which he was one of three directors, and an offshoot of a consultancy in Canada. Kirdi’s company – Game Day International – was set up in 2009 but dissolved two years later “for non-compliance”.

Canadian sources produce further evidence of schemes involving Kirdi that have started and then closed. In 2008 a company called Canadian Emirati for Sports Stadium Development was set up. Despite this business appearing to involve Sheikh Said BinSakr Al Qassimi – a major political and business figure in the United Arab Emirates, and whose name appeared on the business’s official Canadian address – this was also dissolved in 2011. Kirdi was listed as its sole director.

Little information is available, meanwhile, on Kirdi’s current company, AK Obec Petroleum Ltd, set up in 2015 and which does not seem to have its own website. The two listed addresses linking Kirdi and the company are, respectively, a house on the corner of a residential street in the city of Laval, in south-western Quebec, and a building in downtown Montreal that is also home to the Allure Bar and Lounge, where there are Latin nights every weekend and free Champagne for birthday groups.

Whether or not these are likely bases for a petroleum company steered by a man of potential international sporting influence, one thing is at least clear. According to the Government of Canada’s innovation, science and economic development website, AK Obec’s annual filing for 2016 is overdue.

Kirdi’s Wikipedia entry – started in 2012 by a user called YAHYA KIRDI – is another fascinating read, in part for the way it has been updated. Initially it told how Kirdi, born in Aleppo, was a former footballer who later emigrated to the United Arab Emirates and then Canada as his focus moved to the business world. It claimed that Kirdi had contacts in the Canadian government, was an advisor to Liverpool FC, had been appointed a United Nations ambassador, had helped Haitian children after the earthquake of 2010, and boasted wealth estimated at $8bn. The latter claim was later removed.

It is a colourful account at the very least, not that we can be certain who is behind it. There is clearer evidence, though, of Kirdi being involved as president of the board of the Syrian Business Forum. On its website he is listed as a “UNICIF” ambassador.

If the spelling is correct, it would make the businessman an unlikely supporter of a drug that treats bacterial infections. If it is a mistake, and Kirdi was indeed a representative for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, this claim is far from easy to corroborate. An email to UNICEF requesting clarification has not yet had a reply.

While all these accounts are accessible online, what is more elusive is cast-iron proof that Kirdi is a “billionaire”. Yet this did not stop some senior figures at Brunton Park from describing their suitor as such in the early stages of the saga.

John Nixon Co-owner John Nixon was quoted in June 2015 as saying that, according to the club’s “research”, their unnamed investor “indeed” appeared a man of such wealth. Chief executive Nigel Clibbens has since said this was the general view of the board, not merely Nixon’s, adding that such “research” may also have included information, from individuals trusted to the Blues, to which the public may not have been privy.

Clibbens, though, also admitted he had not interrogated this “research” in detail, adding that the person’s actual wealth was less important than the substance of his eventual offer, also insisting the investor would have been “good for the money” to do the deal he proposed. Nixon, for the record, altered his “billionaire” view in 2016, saying United’s man may only have had “access” to billions.

Other claims that Mr Kirdi was a billionaire had, it should be said, circulated at the time his Liverpool interest became known. But these and others were subsequently questioned by supporters and journalists covering the businessman’s courting of the great Merseyside club, which included an early suggestion, according to the Daily Telegraph, that he would meet the owners’ asking price of more than £500m.

Clearly Kirdi got to the table with the Anfield hierarchy to some degree, former Celtic player Andy Lynch emerging as a “go-between”, and was not shy in claiming he had “a select group of investors from the Middle East and Canada” ready to make a big impact.

But just as clearly, a deal never happened. While Kirdi told Bloomberg that the “timing wasn’t right” in the end, and there was insufficient “logic” in the deal being demanded by the hated pair of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, other aspects of his profile raised eyebrows.

Initial descriptions of Kirdi as a former international footballer for Syria, for instance, were downgraded to youth level when Jim Boardman of the Anfieldroad.com website looked deeper. Further reports about a playing and managerial career were also held up to less certain light.

Then there were his elaborate plans for Liverpool: a stadium, hotel, shopping centre and a solarium, no less, to provide residents of the rainy Merseyside city with solar power.

Whilst the man himself was described as an “unknown in Montreal business circles” by the Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada, Kirdi’s group of investors – for it emerged he was acting as a frontman, something which appears to have been repeated in some form with United – remained unidentified.

Some early reports, including in The Guardian, had suggested members of Sharjah’s ruling Al-Qasimi family were part of his consortium, although Mr Kirdi denied this. Speculation mentioned in the Daily Mirror about links with another Syrian tycoon, Rami Makhlouf, were also denied by Kirdi’s representative – and perhaps a good thing, given Mr Makhlouf was in 2008 the subject of sanctions from the US government, who alleged he had “improperly benefited from and aided the public corruption of Syrian regime officials”.

The Anfieldroad.com article, meanwhile, expressed doubts about reports linking Kirdi to the purchase of six passenger jets valued at $43.95m each. These deals were not corroborated by the company concerned, Bombardier, wrote Boardman.

Then there were a few delicious details about his actual businesses in Canada, going back several years; one a corner shop, and two pizza outlets, one of them called Pizza Kirdi. These are said to have opened early into his time in the country – he moved there in 2002, according to the National Post – yet neither appeared to last more than a few years.

This story, according to Anfieldroad.com, was initially described as “nonsense” by Kirdi’s spokesman Dan Diamond, someone reported to have a German Shepherd dog named Liverpool. Yet when apparently confronted with the evidence, Diamond went on to claim these ventures may have been typical paths of “entrepreneurial immigrants” who make smaller investments to create work for their families, while “looking for bigger opportunities for his overseas investors”. Mr Kirdi himself appeared to endorse that line, telling Bloomberg: “When I came to Canada I didn’t come to take welfare. I came to start businesses.”

Again, however reasonable these claims, it does not appear we were dealing with a “billionaire” but a person who, at some stage, claimed to acquire connections with major Middle Eastern money. And, even then, without managing to see through deals for football clubs of different sizes.

This goes not just for Liverpool but Vicenza, and a story that may match Andrew Jenkins’ claim in 2015 that United’s mystery suitor had been “in for” an Italian club, only to pull out when his identity was leaked.

The record says Kirdi’s interest in Vicenza, involving a consortium, lasted until April 2015. Yet the club – currently playing in Italy’s third tier under new American investors and managed by legendary striker Pippo Inzaghi – claimed there was never a written offer for the purchase of shares.

Andy Bell Little more than a month later, and Kirdi’s “genuine and firm” interest was with United, leaving the Blues hierarchy “pleased” and prompting erstwhile vice-president Andy Bell to set the “billionaire” hare running with an excited tweet, later endorsed by Carlisle’s own “research”.

Then, the slow 21-month dance, resulting in many periods of barely-explained silence that included, according to Nigel Clibbens, their unnamed investor eyeing other clubs at the same time United were coping with the devastation of Storm Desmond’s floods from December 2015.

His devotion to the Blues was already, then, looking flaky. And it appears Kirdi’s eye was roving even before that time. On May 25, 2015 – six days after Carlisle announced their new overseas interest – an interview with Kirdi appeared on the Eurosport Arabia website. Here, the businessman is quoted as saying he was in negotiations to buy a Spanish club.

Again, there is no evidence of any such deal being concluded, while it took the best part of two years for him to table a written offer to United that would have invited “ridicule” had it been put to fans.

That, at least, was the conclusion drawn by CUOSC’s John Kukuc, whose organisation later described the potential investor in further critical terms. The Blues, CUOSC said in a members briefing, had jilted someone who had been “unreliable” in attending meetings, “inconsistent” in his approach and “unrealistic” in his plans for the club.

One thing he at least did make happen across the 650-day odyssey was getting signatures on non-disclosure agreements. These, it appears, have left United and CUOSC over a legal barrel when it comes to naming him, something Jenkins last August – a time when no such NDA was in place – had “promised” would occur.

One of those agreements will eventually expire, next February it is understood, but it has added to the frustration of supporters that United have not even been able to state explicitly when this will be.

As such, there is still no official clarity on the enigma who wanted to take control of this proud community’s only professional football club from another continent. As a slice of strange Blues history, it will take some beating.