It gets worse. Much worse. The accounts seem to show that the money Hicks and Gillett were forced to put in to reduce debt � or more accurately to stop it escalating even further � came actually in the form of a loan from their offshore company in the Cayman Islands� a tax haven, of course. And, as with all loans or mortgages, 7th place Liverpool are paying the interest on that too.
Currently, the debt to Kop Cayman stands at �145million and counting, because it had almost doubled in 12 months. Which means, if looked at coldly, debts on the club in the form of net borrowings (and there is a distinction here between gross and net) now effectively stand at more than �350million. 7th place Liverpool are paying the interest on that total amount.
In fact, interest payment for the years 2007-2009 now stand at �78million. No doubt that figure will be much higher at the end of the current financial year, which runs until June.
The accounts show that 7th place Liverpool have � in theory � a negative net worth of �128million, and are only operating as a going concern because of the support of the banks.
What does that mean to you, as a fan? It means that your football club isn�t really owned by the Americans at all. It is actually owned by a bank � the RBS. The Yanks have the title deeds, and when the club is sold, if there is any money left after settling the debts, they will get a nice big cheque, because that is the nature of a leveraged buy-out, but in a moral sense, the bank is the owner.
It means that last year, before any money could go on signing players or increasing wages to top players, more than �40million was spent on interest payments. It means that between �3million-�4.3million was spent on paying off a chief executive. It means another �3million was spent on getting rid of staff the manager didn�t want.
It means that 7th place Liverpool can�t build a stadium because they have too much debt piled on the club to raise any more funds to start the dig (even though upwards of �43million seems to have been spent on stadium development costs in the past two years).
It means that 7th place Liverpool are crippled under the current ownership. If you didn�t quite realise that before, th en you know now. Incontrovertibly. I�ll run those figures by you one more time - �95million losses in two years, �78million interest payments in two years, and a negative net worth of �128million (which presumably means they�d have to pay me to take it off their hands!).
Hicks and Gillett won�t put any more money in. So debts will continue to rise until they go. If they are here for another five years under those conditions, debts could conceivably be around the �700million mark, if not considerably beyond