The advisor to the city of Hradec Králové for the sale of shares in the city’s premier league football club and for the selection of the operator of the new stadium will be an association of the law firm Havel & Partners and Česká spořitelna. The decision was made yesterday by the city councillors. Hradec Králové owns 100 percent of the shares in the club, which finished eighth in the last league season.
Nineteen councillors voted to approve the consultant, the narrowest possible majority in the 37-member council. No councillors spoke in the debate.
Three entities responded to the selection process. The bid, which the city evaluated as the runner-up, was submitted by a partnership of MT Legal and Newton Business Development. The third bidder was Grant Thornton Advisory.
Mayor Pavlína Springerová (Hradec Králové Democratic Club) previously said that the whole process of selecting a strategic partner for the club could take approximately one year. “In the spring we should start actively approaching or looking for partners for the club in cooperation with the advisor,” she said. The decision to sell will be entirely in the hands of the councillors. The mayor said the city also wants to create safeguards against the football club losing its license or moving out of the city.
A consultant would provide the city with comprehensive legal and economic advice for the sale of the club’s shares. He should do an analysis of the options for running the stadium, or administer the tender process. So far, the football club is the operator of the stadium, which opened last August and cost the city CZK 650 million excluding VAT.
In 2022, the previous leadership of the Hradec Králové City Hall, led by ANO and ODS, had the club valued by an expert firm so that it could launch a competition to sell the club and find a strategic partner. However, this did not happen before the municipal elections in autumn 2022. The experts set the price of the club at CZK 25.2 million at the end of 2021.
The last serious negotiations on the sale of the club took place in 2017. At that time, the former national team player Ivo Ulich and a group of three businessmen connected to him, as well as an investment group around Italian businessman Alessandro Barilli and the Hradec Králové-based company Koncedo were bidding for the property. Negotiations with Ulich’s group were the furthest along. However, the representatives eventually rejected Ulich’s entry into the club in June 2017. They said the businessman’s proposed contract was disadvantageous for the city.
Hradec Králové is not the only club to be affected by recent ownership changes. In December, billionaire Pavel Tykač signed a deal to buy Prague-based Slavia with Chinese company CITIC Group. The new majority owner of Liberec is expected to be businessman Ondřej Kania. Since last June, Viktoria Plzeň has had a new owner, the Austrian-Swiss business group FCVP GmbH. According to the media, the sale of clubs from České Budějovice or Teplice is also in the cards.
Source: CTK
Photo: Hradec Králové FC
