Source: Daily_Mail
Portsmouth need £16.5m: Storrie casts doubt as Pompey players wait for pay
Sulaiman Al Fahim's troubled tenure as owner of Portsmouth could be all but over in less than a fortnight if he fails to find £16.5million that includes a staggering £3m payment to two leading agents.
Peter Storrie, the club's chief executive, has said the club will be in danger of going bust if Al Fahim - who was admitted to hospital yesterday with kidney stones - does not come up with a third of the £50m he promised to invest by October 15.
Storrie has already had to rescue Al Fahim this week by organising a £5m loan to pay the players after it emerged that their wages had not landed in their bank accounts on the last day of September. Last night the players were waiting, although club officials insisted they were 'in the process of being paid'.
But the future of Al Fahim at Fratton Park remains very much in doubt as Storrie, confirming Sportsmail's story, said he had to turn to the backer of his rival consortium, Ali al-Faraj, to loan him the money for the wages fiasco.
Storrie, who said that £3m was still owed to agents Pini Zahavi and Jonathan Barnett for the transfers of Glen Johnson to Liverpool andPeter Crouch to Tottenham, did not sound confident yesterday that AlFahim would find the money.
'I have to be truthful and tell you that I don't know if the 30 per cent of the £50m refinancing package will arrive with us in mid-October,' he said. 'The bottom line is the middle to end of October. I really don't know what will happen if that money doesn't come through.
'All I can tell you is what I have seen. The documentation is in place, but the proof of whether it is all genuine will be if it turns up.
'Sulaiman says that it will, so I have to believe that it will. He believes it, so let's wait and see.'
Portsmouth, bottom of the Barclays Premier League after seven straight defeats, have debts of over £10m to rival Premier clubs and Barclays Bank.
Concerning Zahavi and Barnett, Storrie said: 'It is true that we owe a couple of top agents a great deal of money and if you say it is £3m I can confirm it is not far short of that figure. But there are other agents owed their commissions as well. It is through my friendship with them that they are not banging on the door. They have been really understanding.
'But we have owed money on transfers to a number of clubs and those clubs have also been extremely helpful. So, it all depends on the refinancing and I don't see it as a deadline necessarily in mid-October, but it cannot go on any longer than the end of October, to be realistic. I have been asking people to be patient, but they cannot be expected to be patient forever.'
It was claimed yesterday that Al Fahim had been rushed to hospital in Dubai to undergo an operation to remove kidney stones.
Al Fahim, who is 32, issued a statement from his hospital bed promising his problems would not affect the new investment. He even allowed photographs of him receiving treatment to be taken.
