Dejphon Chansiri made desperate call to Mayor in bid to buy more time with Sheffield Wednesday
A Sheffield MP has revealed that former Sheffield Wednesday chairman Dejphon Chansiri reached out to Mayor of South Yorkshire Oliver Coppard in a desperate effort to keep hold of the club.
The failed Thai owner was forced to put the club into administration last week amid pressure from HMRC with regard to a winding-up petition. While Chansiri remains owner in name, he has ceded power to administrators at Begbies Traynor LLP, who have taken a positive and proactive approach to the re-engagement of the club’s fan base after months of protest against Chansiri.
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There throughout the fight has been Sheffield South East MP Clive Betts, a lifelong Wednesdayite who The Star understands played a significant role in the important latter days manoeuvres that pushed the former Owls chairman to finally - and reluctantly - sign administration papers. Betts spoke in Parliament a number of times to publicise the nature of fan concerns over Chansiri’s failure to manage the club and lobbied for its protection.
Speaking to The Star’s Joe Crann on the latest episode of the ‘All Wednesday’ YouTube channel, Betts paid tribute to the commitment of Owls supporters both before and after administration was confirmed - and commented on the mismanagement of the Chansiri decade.
“It’s a failure of 10 years of mismanagement by Chansiri, that’s the reality,” he said. “Now he’s gone, it gives us hope and the possibility of better planning for the future. The club’s strength has shone through throughout this; its fan base. The Sheffield Wednesday Supporters Trust who mobilised the boycotts; what club could have done such an effective boycott on Wednesday night against Middlesbrough?
“Two days later they’re queuing around the block in the club shop with half a million pounds handed over in a short time, because fans are determined to show support for a new regime. That’s absolutely fantastic.”
Betts, who has served the city as a Labour MP since 1992, worked alongside the Supporters Trust and others throughout the last months of action against Chansiri. While he stopped short of going into detail about his involvement in the final stages of the effort to move the club on from his ownership, its known by The Star that he played an important role in doing so.
“I was pushing HMRC initially to get them to take some action,” he said. “It seemed incredible to me that we all have to pay our taxes and the tax man comes to demand it if we don’t; yet Chansiri apparently was owing a million pounds and nothing much was happening.
“Then the possibility of administration came and I was saying at that point to the tax man, through helpful sources - let’s put it that way - in Government, that it might be better if they just delayed for a little while, because administration was a cleaner way forward. The administrators then worked very hard to persuade Chansiri. By their own admission he was a very difficult man to deal with. But we’ve all had experience of that, haven’t we?”
Betts was also able to confirm rumours that Chansiri had reached out to South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard in a desperate late attempt to ease pressure from HMRC and buy himself more time to work his way out of a desperate situation. It came after Sheffield MPs had made efforts to engage with him some months ago by way of open letter - attempts that were roundly ignored.
Betts continued: “The answer came back ‘Who are these people and what’s it got to do with them?’ That was a rather dismissive response from him and that’s as far as we ever got. The only communication he ever made with anyone political was when out of the blue last Monday he suddenly got in touch with the Mayor and asked if he could talk to him.
“The Mayor being the Mayor is responsible to all the people in South Yorkshire. He had a conversation and without going into details and breaching confidentiality, I think Mr Chansiri’s ideas of what the Mayor could do, including stopping the tax man from suing him, were perhaps a little removed from reality.
“Perhaps in Thailand that’s how it works; a senior business person phones the local Mayor up and suddenly the tax man doesn’t want his money anymore. But it doesn’t happen like that in this country and that was pretty well established quite quickly.”