Football bosses must tune into reality

LAST week was a good one for BSkyB, teaming up with the BBC over digital terrestrial licences and with the Football League for four years in a £95m deal. People have short memories. When BSkyB came on the scene in 1987, it was viewed by one and all as the enemy. Football clubs and the Government did not want to know the company while the BBC and ITV laughed off the competition. Look who the joke is on now.

The BBC needed the satellite broadcaster's content to make the digital service half-respectable and the Football League will get less than a quarter of the fantasy annual payment due from ITV Digital.

The bottom line is that BSkyB has done a great job in presenting sport and it is about time the regulators and all those other goody-goodies who are bending over backwards to put obstacles in their way, finally woke up and realised it, just as the football clubs have.

When it comes to sport, there is no other show in town. To be fair to BSkyB, it is paying the Football League about the same £25m per year it paid the last time it won the rights. If I was a Premier League chairman now, I would pull in the reins. Anyone who thinks there is going to be more money on the table when the current deal runs out is also playing fantasy football.

I hope Peter Ridsdale of Leeds United takes good note of this and does not promise his new manager Terry Venables too much money to spend on players. Ridsdale, like all other chairmen, needs to give his manager a crash course in economics. 'Tel, cashflow is not an ATM that's on the blink.'

Fraud reward

WHAT a sorry state of affairs it is when, in the aftermath of WorldCom and Xerox, the Securities and Exchange Commission offers a hint of amnesty, by saying to the top 1,000 listed firms in the US that if they have been covering something up, now is the time to come clean.

There was a time you looked at certain companies and rated them as triple A covenants. I was talking the other day to a property man about WorldCom. He raised a very good point.

He said that if he had been approached a few weeks ago to sign up WorldCom as a tenant on a 25-year lease for one of his properties, he would have bitten its hand off. If an agent had offered him a property with WorldCom as the tenant, he would have paid a lot of money thinking he had a tenant as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.

What do fund managers, pensioners, property investors do now, who can you trust? You either have crazed management on an ego trip that ruins solid companies such as Marconi, or you have fraudsters who cook the books.

In the case of the ego-crazed, there is an excuse. They are intimidated by fund managers and driven by bizarre bonus schemes to do all sorts of bad business deals. There is no excuse for cooking the books.

Some corporate heads are going to roll. There are going to be a lot of fall guys. I blame the auditors and global auditing standard authorities. Some of the creative accounting is no more than certain auditors turning a blind eye to what they know is false accounting.

You have to look at the motives. Sometimes the audit fees are insignificant compared with the fat consultancy fees they charge the same client.

It comes down to the old motto 'the customer is always right'. Faced with biting the hand that feeds them by charging an exorbitant consultancy fee, it is amazing how they come up with new ways of valuing or expressing things which previously they would have frowned on.

This, on a much smaller scale, reminds me of the days when a sole trader with no accounts to show went to a little firm of accountants such as 'Uncle Hymie' under the arches to cook up a set of books which enabled them to get a mortgage for a house. What a joke for the SEC to suggest an amnesty. It reminds me of the time the police allowed every one to hand in firearms with no questions asked.

Only the Americans can turn a disaster into a self-pacifying party. There will be new counselling associations formed such as 'Fraudsters Anonymous'. You can imagine large annual conventions in Las Vegas. 'Hello, my name is Alvin. I'm a fraudster. I've been one for the past three years, I just couldn't face it any more. I am so glad to be here today to share my story with you folks.'

Soon, they will be handing out gold statuettes at the concluding ceremony for Reformed Fraudster of the Year.

Sir Alan Sugar has donated his fee to charity