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The son of former Conservative Party deputy chairman and billionaire donor Lord Ashcroft has bought a 3.4% stake in Tottenham Hotspur in the latest change at the north London club.
A public filing posted by the London Stock Exchange yesterday shows that Andrew Ashcroft, a hotelier and businessman, purchased 8,023,942 Tottenham shares last Friday. The price is not disclosed, but based on recent valuations of Tottenham the shares are likely to have cost around £100m.
Lord Ashcroft is a long-standing Tottenham shareholder who at one stage owned around 4% of the club. It was unclear last night whether Ashcroft has sold his existing shares to his son, Andrew, or if the family have almost doubled their stake by buying from minority shareholders, who until last week owned 13.42% of the club between them.
Tottenham’s majority shareholder ENIC, of whom former club chairman Daniel Levy owns 29.88%, has not sold any of its shares and is adamant the club is not for sale. Levy left the board suddenly after 25 years as the club’s most senior director earlier this month and has been replaced by Peter Charrington, a long-time advisor of the Lewis family who own ENIC, as non-executive chairman.
Tottenham subsequently announced that they had rejected two preliminary expressions of interest in buying the club from Amanda Staveley’s PCP Capital Partners and an American/Chinese consortium led by Roger Kennedy and Firehawk Holdings Limited. Under takeover panel rules the club remain under the official offer period until 5 October, by which point PCP and the consortium must either make a formal offer for the club or announce they have no plans to do so.
The takeover panel could compel the Ashcrofts to announce they are working together if there is evidence they are doing so. The takeover code states there is no presumption that family members with shares in the same company are acting in concert, but that they will be treated as doing so if there is evidence they are co-ordinating their shareholdings. Tottenham declined to comment.
Andrew Ashcroft was based in Belize, where he owns a hotel and his father has substantial business interests, until 2021 when his then partner Jasmine Hartin was charged with manslaughter after accidentally shooting a police officer. Hartin was spared prison after pleading guilty, but Ashcroft obtained custody of their two children and moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands to launch a new business venture.
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In 2019 Andrew Ashcroft was hauled off an American Airlines flight in handcuffs and arrested for public intoxication after the pilots were forced to abandon the take-off due to his behaviour.
