http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3602825/Saviour-dreamer-Sportsmail-talks-Aston-Villa-s-owner-waiting-Dr-Tony-Xia.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490Saviour or dreamer? Sportsmail talks to Aston Villa’s owner-in-waiting, Dr Tony Xia
Businessman Tony Xia is set to buy Aston Villa for a 'bargain' £74.5m
Sportsmail's Nick Harris spoke to the billionaire in his Beijing home
He says it's a big deal for fans but small compared to his £3.5bn US swoop
Xia revealed how he became acquainted with China’s president, Xi Jinping
billionaire admits Villa are not the sole object of his footballing affections
His plan is to make the Aston area home to a football theme park
Villa’s academy will find and nurture the best young talent in China
Tony Xia, Aston Villa’s owner-in-waiting, chuckles when asked if he is a dollar billionaire.
‘I think it’s rather more than that,’ says the 39-year-old Chinese businessman, explaining that just a few months ago he sold one of his companies, Teamax, for £430million, which is sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent, in part on Villa.
‘I own quite a lot of private businesses and I think I can sell some of them for the same amount or more,’ adds Xia, who has provided The Mail on Sunday with a bank transfer certificate purporting to show the funds from the Teamex deal.
Speaking from his home in Beijing on Saturday in an hour-long exclusive interview, he revealed not just the financial nuts and bolts of the deal that could put him in control at Villa Park within weeks but much more about his plans for the club.
‘If’, for the moment, is the key word in the phrase ‘if his plans come to fruition’. Xia was happy to talk about his past, his private life, his business career and his finances.
Within weeks he will need to prove, beyond doubt and with hard cash, that he has the assets and ability to buy Villa and fund it. Initial checks corroborate some of the information.
But the reality is that China has an opaque business environment and a chaotically expanding economy. In the short time since Xia hit the headlines, it is impossible to verify everything about him.
Even his birth-date has been questioned. Xia, whose full name is Xia Jiantong, says he was born on October 26, 1976, and that the confusion arose because he started school as a precocious four-year-old whose parents needed for legal reasons to pretend he was six.
What is fact, and The Mail on Sunday has verified, is that he studied landscape design at Harvard University in the late 1990s, started a design company, XWHO, in Boston, Massachusetts in March 1999, co-owned by his girlfriend at the time Cong Liu and one of his lecturers, Prof Charles Harris.
Registries in the USA and China show the company relocated to Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang, where Xia also started Teamex, a planning company that has provided services as hundreds of new cities have been built.
Firms operating across IT, health, transport, design, tourism and finance were added. Xia’s business empire exists under an umbrella organisation called the RECON Group but most of the subsidiaries are privately held, not stockmarket listed. The most visible, Lotus, has been loss-making but Xia is open about this and says it is turning around.
He insists that within a few months a series of major mergers and acquisitions will bring a bigger chunk of his business into the public domain. ‘I would rather keep a low profile,’ he says. It is pointed out that buying a football club just relegated from the Premier League is not a clever way to do that. ‘Actually you’re right,’ he laughs.
‘There’s been more attention than I’d expect or could predict. I knew people would pay attention, but not this much.’
Scrutiny, he is finding out, comes as part of the package and he discloses what he will pay for Villa. Lerner, the American owner, wanted more than £100m but Xia says he has settled for £52m up front, plus Xia’s guarantee of clearing Villa’s overdraft at HSBC of £24.5m. Xia says that £74.5m is thus sitting in a ring-fenced bank account.
Lerner will earn a £30m bonus if Villa return to the Premier League within three years and another £10m if they stay there for another three years after promotion.
‘I appreciate it’s a big deal for Villa fans,’ he says. ‘But actually in pure business terms, I’m working on acquisitions much bigger than this.’ He says, for example, that within months he will complete a $3.5bn takeover of a US logistics firm.
If true, Villa fans could well have got themselves an owner if not quite as rich as Roman Abramovich then certainly extremely wealthy. Whether he, like them, is a lifelong supporter, is less clear.
Xia spent five months on an exchange at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1998-99 and saw one Villa home game during that time. He says he cannot remember who they played, or the score. This hardly smacks of an awestruck devotee.
He insists he has kept an eye on Villa’s fortunes since but admits he also has a soft spot for Arsenal and is rather more convincing waxing lyrical on Dennis Bergkamp and Thierry Henry. ‘I can assure you my first and only football priority from now will be Aston Villa though,’ he says.
Xia says he has offered the manager’s job to one of three candidates in the public domain but won’t confirm which of Roberto Di Matteo, Nigel Pearson or David Moyes it is.
‘When the manager is appointed, we will discuss his budget,’ Xia adds. It is expected between £20m and £50m will be available for transfers, depending on the case made by whoever gets the job.
The long-term plan include a football museum and theme park to attract football tourists from China and India, and the recruitment of young Chinese players to Villa’s academy, if not as formal scholars then on exchange programmes.
Xia says he will spend a lot of time in Birmingham over the next year, buying a house for himself and his wife Sally and daughter Charlotte, who turns two this summer. He says buying a club has been a long-term aim.
He has played football since college; Harvard records show him in the university league. He says love of the sport and a desire to diversify his business interests are his main driver, although the knowledge that China’s president, Xi Jinping, wants China to become a footballing superpower, is not lost on him.
He has known the president for some time, albeit not closely. Xi was the most senior government official in Zhejiang Province when Xia relocated there to the same industrial park as Jack Ma, China’s richest man in recent years.
President Xi visited both men’s companies when they were still on the up. Xia dreams he might be tempted to Villa Park too.
For now, that remains a dream, just as Xia knows his plans for Villa remain a dream in the eyes of many. He still has everything to prove.
