Football club Vitesse has run into further problems now that the accountant refuses to approve the annual accounts for last season because there are doubts about the continuity of the club. According to the rules of the KNVB, the Arnhem football club should have submitted approved annual accounts on October 1.
Sources around the football club confirm this. The KNVB licensing committee will soon meet about the consequences for Vitesse. The club can be fined and, in extreme cases, the club’s license can be revoked.
One of the problems that threatens Vitesse is that the club will no longer have a bank account at the beginning of next year. House banker ING wants more details about the financing by the Russian owners of Vitesse in recent years and intends to terminate the relationship as of April 1 next year if there is insufficient clarity. In the meantime, Vitesse thought it had found a new banker with the Lithuanian bank Revolut, but that bank has also terminated its relationship with the Arnhem club, sources confirm.
Russian heritage
When asked, interim director of Vitesse Peter Rovers confirms the problems with the annual accounts and the broken banking relationship with Revolut. “That all counts in the accountant’s assessment, as does the fact that the KNVB has still not approved the takeover of Vitesse. We have therefore asked the Football Association for a postponement.”
Vitesse has been waiting for months for permission from the KNVB for a takeover by an American investor, with which the club hopes to get out of trouble. But Vitesse’s Russian heritage makes that takeover difficult and has also caused many of the problems.
The club came into the hands of Georgian businessman Merab Jordania, a good friend of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, in 2010. Abramovich, who has been on American and European sanctions lists since the war in Ukraine due to his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was then the owner of the English club Chelsea, with which Vitesse started working intensively.
Money from the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich continued to flow towards Arnhem
There were already stories about Abramovich’s influence on Vitesse and also that he secretly invested money in the Arnhem football club. That was always denied, but at the beginning of this year secret documents published by the British newspaper They Guardian revealed that Abramovich was indeed financially involved with Vitesse through a complicated construction.
Even after the Russian Alexander Chigirinski took over the shares of Jordania and became the owner of Vitesse, money from Abramovich continued to flow to Arnhem. The club’s current owner, Russian businessman Valeri Ojf, is a good friend of Abramovich. Earlier this year, the KNVB licensing committee hired forensic investigation agency Integis to investigate all these ties. As long as these are not clear, Vitesse cannot be sold.
Since Russian investors took control at Vitesse, the club has structurally been operating at too high a standard. The owners have closed the deficit with loans for years, with the result that the club has a debt of 155 million euros to Ojf. He is willing to waive that, he has promised.
But this does not solve the problem of structural deficits. Vitesse is therefore dependent on the willingness and ability of the intended buyer to invest millions in the club now, without it being certain that the takeover will soon be approved.