Gerry Cardinale has conducted some meetings with potential investors from overseas but he is not planning to sell AC Milan any time soon, a report claims.
Tuttosport (via PianetaMilan) report that Cardinale has been looking for some months for the necessary capital to repay the three-year loan granted by the seller Elliott Management – the ‘vendor loan’ – at the time of the club’s sale in the summer of last year.
The newspaper reports the figures: €585m plus interest at 7%, which brings the total sum to be repaid to around €700m given that the deadline is set for 2025.
The operation that that saw Milan shift from the hands of Elliott to RedBird was not debt-free. From Milan’s balance sheet, we read that the pledge established by RedBird in favour of Elliott concerns 99.93% of the Rossoneri club’s shares, not just the shares corresponding to the ‘vendor loan’ (48.75%).
These are the agreements relating to the vehicles used: Acm Bidco by RedBird in the Netherlands, Rossoneri Sport Investment by Elliott in Luxembourg. The latter was created at the time of the sale from Fininvest to Yonghong Li in 2017, and controlled by the hedge fund since the summer of 2018.
If RedBird did not repay the loan, the newspaper concludes, Milan would lose all of it, not just part of it. Cardinale has a need: to grow Milan even more and find a positive balance between purchase and resale. Grow the value of Milan while looking for capital to repay the loan.
