Hearts smokescreen clears but gloom lingers

Stuart Bathgate
SLOWLY and steadily, the truth is emerging about the cause of Hearts' recent financial difficulties. The smokescreen is clearing, and the real picture is becoming discernible.
There is no detail in that picture which will have a reassuring effect on supporters of the club. Instead, the grounds for genuine concern are growing by the day.

It has been known for years that Hearts as an independent entity were not viable. The debts which mounted up under the former chief executive Chris Robinson made sure of that.

But, since Vladimir Romanov bought Robinson out, and his Ukio Bankas Investment Group (Ubig) took Hearts over, the club's debts, large though they were, did not present an acute problem. Robinson's "solution" to the debt was to sell Tynecastle: Romanov cancelled that sale, and presented Ubig as a benevolent parent company who would help the football team grow.

For as long as Ubig was able to bring in substantial sums from other parts of its operations, that was a plausible vision, even if the Kaunas-based businessman sometimes became too fanciful in his assessment of how big Hearts could become. If Ubig were ever to run into difficulties of its own, however, it was obvious that Hearts would again have serious problems to face.

It is too early to form an accurate assessment of how serious the problems now facing Ubig have become. But there is no longer any doubt that these problems are real, and could be growing. Even Hearts' employees no longer feel able to tell themselves – never mind the outside world – that the club's recent inability to pay staff has been caused by a technical hitch. Such an explanation is simply no longer credible.

In September, when players and administrative staff were paid late, Hearts' various spokespeople blamed a blip; and last week the failure to pay players was supposedly down to a glitch. Yesterday, when it emerged that up to half a dozen players had not been paid along with their team-mates on Monday, there was no attempt to write the matter off as a quirk.

No, it's not the fault of Halifax Bank of Scotland. Hearts do have a current account with Hbos, and until recently that was the source of players' weekly wages and the staff's salaries. But the recent non-payment problems did not arise from within the bank's august headquarters in central Edinburgh. And no, it's not got anything to do with the hold-ups which sometimes arise in currency transfers. If last Friday's non-payment was just caused by a flaw which could be ironed out in a day or two, there would have been no need for Anatoly Korobochka, Hearts' sport director, to open talks with some of the club's highest earners and persuade them to accept a deferral of their wages.

It does not take a genius to deduce that the cause is a cash-flow problem. When the global economy has undergone a liquidity crisis which at one point became so sever that President Bush declared "This sucker could go down", it would be a major surprise if a financial group like Ubig were to be immune from it all.

There's no disgrace in feeling harder up than you were: we're all in this together, after all. But Hearts have found it extremely hard to admit that they and Ubig exist in the same, real world as the rest of us.

On Saturday, after it emerged that the players had gone unpaid for a second time, the club released a short statement to say that the matter would be resolved on Monday. On Monday, there was a second short statement which said that the players had been paid.

"As announced earlier, players' wages were processed on Friday and the money has reached their accounts this afternoon as agreed," the statement read, with a certain air of "told you so". They said they would do something, and they had duly delivered, was the implication. Only it wasn't true.

For some six players, the reality was that no money reached their accounts. All they got was a promise that they'd receive the money as soon as possible. It may be hard to feel sympathy for sportsmen who go a week or two without receiving what many believe are grossly inflated wages, but this is not about Bruno Aguiar, Christos Karipidis or the other unpaid players as individuals. It's about the potential longer-term impact on the club as a whole.

It was the highest earners who were asked to take a deferral, as the ones who could most afford it. If the situation gets worse, it could affect people whose savings, if they exist at all in these debt-ridden times, are far smaller. In other words, failure to pay six relatively well-off men could be the thin end of the wedge.

Unless Ubig's fortunes pick up dramatically, and in the present economic climate that seems unlikely, Hearts will at the very least have to start generating some revenue of their own, and forget about their former dreams of being funded in perpetuity by a football-mad Baltic businessman. Short-term funding is now such a problem that they are possibly reliant on retail sales over the Christmas period to tide them over.

The two January matches against Hibs are also signs of hope for enhanced revenue. And then there is next month's transfer window, when the club hope to sell at least one of their bigger names, with Laryea Kingston looking like the favourite – only which other club, knowing the parlous position in which Hearts find themselves, would offer top dollar for Kingston or anyone else?

Taken from the Scotsman