Exclusive:Creditors paid, agent claim disputed and Chansiri moved out in Sheffield Wednesday administration latest
While Sheffield Wednesday’s bold new era continues to click into gear, the details are being worked through to formally move the club out of its administration.
Activity on Companies House this week showed the process of formally moving Sheffield Wednesday out of its administration process is continuing.
New owners Arise are at the wheel and moving forward with a vast on-and-off field rebuild of the club, with the background work being completed behind the scenes in no small part by administrators at Begbies Traynor.
Notifications on the pages of both Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd and Sheffield 3 Ltd reflected that documents relating to the ‘result of meeting of creditors’ were in the process of being published and would be made publicly available within 10 days. The notice is procedural and is necessary under the terms of the Insolvency Act of 1986. Both companies were placed into administration alongside one another in October last year.
The Star understands that the documents are likely to be short and not hugely exciting, though it is expected that they will confirm the approval of the latest round of proposals put forward by the administrators following a meeting. As previously reported, it is understood that the vast majority of creditors have been paid 25 per cent of their individual claims as in-line with the terms of the agreement between new Owls owners Arise and the EFL on their exit from administration. It is believed these payments were made before the turn of the month.
Two claimants not paid to date, The Star understands, are Wednesday’s former owner Dejphon Chansiri and a Mr Luis Miguel Azevedo Povoa Alves, a Portuguese agent who claimed a debt of £3,785,243 as per a report to creditors distributed at the end of February.
It is by now well documented that Chansiri stands to take nothing from the administration proceedings, having moved to accept a deal just a few minutes after a deadline was set that could have seen him take bonuses from the club’s future performance. Joint-administrator Paul Stanley has publicly confirmed that he expects Chansiri to walk away without a penny. In the case of Alves - whose claim is submitted as an unsecured loan - The Star understands the level of claim put forward is the source of discussion and is being adjudicated.
Alves has been a registered agent in the UK and in his native Portugal - and was the lead intermediary in deals that brought Marco Matias and Momo Diaby to Hillsborough in 2015 and 2023 respectively. Football rules would not allow for clubs to accept loans from agents - though it is suggested Alves had de-registered as an agent at the time any payments were made to Wednesday in his name. The Star is led to believe more than one payment was made and that it came while Chansiri’s struggles to finance the club were worsening.
Any dispute over the claim of Alves is a matter for the administration proceedings and is not expected to have any material impact on Sheffield Wednesday.
On Thursday Companies House also reflected that two Chansiri-owned companies - ‘Sheffield 2’ and ‘D Performance Ltd’ - had formally changed its address from Hillsborough stadium to an address in London. It follows other Chansiri companies to have followed suit in recent months.
Little is known of the function of D Performance, which appears to be a small and largely inactive business. Sheffield 2 appears to have been used a shell company set up in June 2019 to acquire two other companies; Sheffield Wednesday Holdings Ltd and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd. The company played a role in controversial arrangements involving the sale or leasing of Hillsborough back to the club in 2019 and 2020. This included future rent obligations and inter-company loans.
Neither of these companies were part of the administration proceedings.