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Post by waynesbrain on Feb 24, 2015 22:18:16 GMT
Inspired by hfc's searching question. Where did Vlads cash actually come from? And did he really have any of the readies or was it just a paper trail which was bound to unravel eventually regardless of the banking crisis and international financial meltdown??
Ps, decided to put this in General gossip as i don't think anything Vlad did was particularly football related or motivated.
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Post by maroon1 on Feb 24, 2015 22:39:14 GMT
I think Vlad did actually have a fortune when he arrived on the scene with us, but it was stretched too far and the worldwide banking collapse did for him. Aye it turned out badly for us with him in the end but I maintain that he wasn't the man responsible for our administration
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Post by waynesbrain on Feb 25, 2015 0:31:31 GMT
I'd agree that he wasn't wholly responsible for our administration. The writing was on the wall at the club before he came along due to years of financial imprudence. Indeed that was the reason he was invited on board in the first place.
He was, however, complicit to an extent in that the debt which he inherited from the Robinson era was never correctly managed and indeed was allowed to spiral out of all control.
The longer he had control, the larger the debt became whether it was to Ukio or Ubig. In the end it all came crashing down like a house of cards. Looking back now, it probably was inevitable that it would.
He may well have been a very rich man at one time, but how much money do you believe he actually put into Hearts in real terms? Or was the majority of the wheeling and dealing merely a smoke and mirrors charade? Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, worthless share issues and all the other questionable goings on.
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Post by drj1956 on Feb 25, 2015 7:18:51 GMT
I think waynebrain is pretty close to the truth with his summing up.mmi can't agree that Vlad wasnt responsible for us being in Admin though. I've always made the point that we owed less at the end of Vlads rein than we did at the beginning which I assume is Maroons point. However when you take into account the huge transfer fees we received admin could and should have been avoided. I'm still not sure where all that transfer money went,
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Post by MTS on Feb 25, 2015 7:40:58 GMT
I'm with Maroon1 on this, Vlad's money disappeared when the Banks crashed. As for the Pieman, he never had an excuse.
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Post by K19 on Feb 25, 2015 8:20:02 GMT
It was simply a money-laundering scam for his Russian friends who are now protecting him. That's why he was looking to buy Dundee, Dunfermline etc before he took over Hearts. He didn't care which club he bought as long as he got an operation going in the UK. Every penny we got in was passed to Lithuania and every bill we ever paid was relying on money being sent from Lithuania. Dirty money passed to Scotland to pay bills, clean money passed from Scotland to pay the mafia. The whole bank thing was a money-laundering scam, not just the Hearts operation. The bigger the squad and the wages bill the more dirty money he could launder. Hearts fans liking Vlad is like Sevco fans liking Craig Whyte. They both raped the shit out of the club and stopped only because they had to, not because they chose to, and not giving a fuck for the mess they left behind.
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Post by maroon1 on Feb 25, 2015 9:27:28 GMT
Don't agree with the comparison between Whyte and Vlad. I'm not going to defend our man over his financial imprudence but he went in to a fckn basket case and attempted to keep it running and vibrant. Whyte had R angers on it's knees within weeks of taking over and had no interest in doing anything other than filling his pockets from it. Yeah Vlad was wrong for us (ultimately) but circumstances outwith his control ie banking collapse and the attitude of the GFA/MSM meant he was always treading water with us
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Post by K19 on Feb 25, 2015 9:55:28 GMT
The banking collapse just got him fingered for what he was up to, Maroon. It affected the timing, not the outcome. I sort of understand the 'Vlad spoke the truth and was a lovable rogue' argument but nevertheless he was a rogue. A big rogue who knew exactly what he was doing -far more so that Whyte who is just a chancer who tried his luck and fucked it up.
Romanov was told in April by the Lithuanian Financial Crime Investigation Service that he was to be investigated on the Ukio Bankas embezzlement allegation.
It has also been claimed that Romanov is under the protection of bodyguards connected to former warlord and now Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov.
He is said to have sought protection after Russian gangsters lost millions of pounds when Ukio Bankas went bust.
The FBI found links to Ukio Bankas while investigating money laundering.
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Post by maroon1 on Feb 25, 2015 10:02:02 GMT
Yeah he was a rogue and no mistake 19, and was definitely in it for himself and not us, BUT he did actually have the means necessary to run us until the banking world went tits up, Craig Whyte had fck all but a brass neck and a line of credit obtained fraudulently. I'm glad we're shot of the mad one but I hate the fact that Robinson still swans around Tynecastle and has dodged his share of the blame in our demise
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Post by Dedrokstar on Feb 25, 2015 10:32:12 GMT
Vlad's money came from him buying into Soviet utility & industry on the cheap when the Wall fell (in a consortium which included Roman Abramowicz), then flogging it for a massive fortune. Having previous been a black marketeer I'm sure he had many other dodges on the go but not to that scale.
It was laundered by pumping money into the club at the start, then milking it back by keeping the debt artificially high so that we were pumping money into Lithuania in bank charges.
A lot of Hoboconomists and other critics don't realise that HMFC didn't go bust. We had been trading equitably month to month for a year and a half but the bank debt was key. Admin happened because we couldn't pay our wages or tax bills in one sum, due to cash flow not insolvency. Other than Ukio liabilities, we owed less than 2.5m. By the time the list was published we had paid off at least 0.5m through normal trading. Including the charities so often referred to by the more rabid amongst the Hibs support.
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