HEARTS yesterday confirmed that they have withdrawn from a deal to sell Tynecastle and announced that a Lithuanian bank has agreed to take over the club's pounds-17.6m debt.
The moves, which were announced via a statement to the stock exchange, will go a long way towards removing the financial uncertainty which has haunted the club for years. The threat of having to play home games at Murrayfield has also now disappeared.
The club's board announced that it had withdrawn from the agreement to sell Tynecastle to Cala Management Limited for pounds-22m and that Cala would get compensation of up to pounds-75,000.
The withdrawal follows an extraordinary general meeting last month when 70-per cent of the club's shareholders voted in favour of cancelling the Cala agreement.
Following the vote, the board received financial guarantees from Vladimir Romanov, the Lithuanian banker who is the club's biggest single shareholder, which in turn gave the board the confidence to withdraw.
In a separate development, the Lithuanian-based UKIO Bankas, in which Romanov has a major interest, has agreed to take over the club's huge debt from Halifax/Bank of Scotland (HBOS). George Foulkes, the Hearts chairman, claimed that yesterday's developments demonstrated Romanov's commitment to Hearts.
Foulkes also said that the announcement removed any lingering fear the club had of going into administration.
"What has happened today is very good news for Hearts. I believe it is the final piece in Mr Romanov's jigsaw and the fact his bank has taken over the debt removes any threat we had of administration, " he said.
"It means Tynecastle will be the home of this club for the foreseeable future. In the longterm we have two options. The first is to upgrade Tynecastle and try to make the stadium more commercially viable. The other option is to move to a new site, with places like Sighthill being mentioned, if we find the problems in upgrading Tynecastle are insurmountable.
"Clearly, like the majority of Hearts supporters, my first choice would be to stay at Tynecastle. What Mr Romanov has done with his investment and actions means we can take our time working out what is best for Hearts and don't have to be hurried because of a worry over money."
A spokesman for Romanov claimed last night that he was committed to Hearts, as his actions had shown.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article