The Trillion Dollar Con Man

Published last October, Notts County supporter Ben Robinson’s book on football and fraud should appeal to avid watchers of true crime documentaries just as much as to football fans.

'The Trillion Dollar Con Man' is the remarkable story of how a con artist engineered a takeover of Notts County in order to set up a giant swindle that involved Sven-Goran Eriksson, Sol Campbell, Eddie Jordan, the Bahraini royal family and the government of North Korea.

Notts County are still best-known as being the oldest professional football club in the world and for inspiring Juventus’ change from their original pink colours to their famous Bianconeri stripes, but in 2009, they were perennial strugglers heading into their sixth straight season in League Two. They appeared unlikely targets for a takeover by Arabian billionaires looking to propel the club to the very top of English football.

The football world was shocked then when what was described as a consortium from the Middle East, including royalty, made an approach under the name Munto Finance to buy Nottingham’s second club. For context, this was less than a year after Manchester City had been taken over by Sheikh Mansour so even the most incredible of sales pitches were that little bit more believable.

It was clear from the beginning who the front men for the bid were, but only vague information was given about the financial backers. Munto director Nathan Willett claimed to have been involved in the construction of the Burj Al Arab and Dubai International Airport. He brought Peter Trembling in as Chief Executive of Notts County and to be the face of the takeover. However, the man really making the decisions behind the scenes was Russell King, now also known as The Trillion Dollar Conman.

 

 

King (pictured above with Eriksson) was introduced as a consultant, but his name never appeared on any official documents to do with the football club. He even signed himself as Lord Voldemort (‘He Who Must Not Be Named’) in memos. There was very good reason for his role to be hidden because King had spent two years in prison in the early ‘90s for an insurance scam and had a trail of bankrupt businesses in his past.  

Many years later, he moved to the Channel Islands and bled a Jersey-based hedge fund dry with the loss of millions. When the police came hunting in 2008, King absconded to Bahrain. There, he began going by the name Steve King - ingeniously making himself virtually unsearchable online due to the avalanche of material on the world’s most famous horror author. His new racket was to convince people that he was managing investments for the Bahraini royal family.

On to the summer of 2009 and King flew the Notts County directors to Bahrain for negotiations. They met his accomplice Abid Hyat Khan – a purported Bahraini prince who was from Bahrain, but certainly wasn’t a prince. The plan presented to County was to be in the Championship by 2012 (the club’s 150^th anniversary) and progress to the Premier League. The new owners would develop Meadow Lane into a 40,000-seater stadium with training facilities, hotels and a conference centre. King produced a bank guarantee for £5,000,000 from First London bank to alleviate any concerns the current board might have. The Supporters Trust, who had kept County debt-free, would have to hand the club over for a nominal fee of one pound and they were excited to do so.

With the takeover agreed, the first big coup was to appoint former England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson as Director of Football on a five-year contract. Just as the board had, the Swede did his due diligence by consulting friends in the FA about the authenticity of the project. They said it was all in order and the owners passed the EFL’s Fit and Proper Persons Test after a delay.

With that, Sven set about assembling a team to blitz the fourth tier of English football. Kasper Schmeichel came from Manchester City for £15,000 a week. Ex West Brom striker Lee Hughes put his own three years in prison behind him to bang in 30 goals that season. 73-times capped Sol Campbell was signed, but only lasted one game. King and Willett had wooed him with promises to fund an inner-city charity and with a bigger salary than he had ever had from Arsenal. Campbell smelled a rat quickly upon arrival in Nottingham with no evidence of the promised big signings or facilities and he scarpered.

 

 

Willett’s big plan was to bring the 36-year old Roberto Carlos to League Two while dream moves for Luis Figo and David Beckham were being given seemingly serious consideration. Money was no object. Everything was on credit. King engaged in lavish spending on restaurants and entertainment, all on the club’s account. Later in the year, Roberto Mancini agreed a deal to become manager for a £6,000,000 annual salary, but the entire plot had begun to unravel by then so they had to settle for Steve Cotterill instead.

Having taken over Notts County, the next step in the con was to add the BMW Sauber Formula One team to Munto’s portfolio. King, who had talked his way into representing F1 driver Jenson Button as an agent back in 2004, was passionate about motor racing while knowing almost nothing about football. He had already tried to organise the purchase of Jordan Racing for the rulers of Dubai. The sheikhs had agreed to allow King name the venture Team Dubai, but had never committed to funding any of it and, just like the Sauber purchase, the deal never came to pass, though it had drawn a lot of media attention.

At the same time as Munto Finance made moves in the sporting world, King’s next shell company Swiss Commodity Holding (SCH) ‘bought’ the asset management division of First London bank on behalf of Bahrain, unbeknownst to the Bahrainis. This gave the newly-formed SCH the appearance of being an established and successful business for decades. They invented details of mining reserves owned by the company which would make it the biggest mining company in the world if you believed its portfolio.

This is where the hustle really started. Ownership of the world’s oldest football club and, potentially, a Formula One racing team was purely misdirection – the critical element of an illusionist’s act – to create a buzz around the launch of SCH on the world’s stock markets. That’s where King planned to make real money.

The next step was the most dangerous and it required taking Sven to Pyongyang that October. Part of Eriksson’s deal was to act as an ambassador for Swiss Commodity Holding and his Notts County salary would be paid in shares ahead of the flotation. King and Willett promised the North Korean government $1 billion in Bahraini cash and $2 billion in SCH shares for exclusive rights to North Korean mining of coal, gold, silver and iron ore. Those rights were theoretically worth up to ten trillion dollars except for a small problem – international sanctions prevented any trade and exporting of North Korean resources, making the deal worthless in reality.

While Sven was there just to shake hands, smile and add cachet to the offer, the North Koreans asked him, as a member of FIFA’s Football Committee, to fix a good draw for them in the 2010 World Cup finals. They weren’t convinced by his assertions that this was impossible.

It was soon to get even more uncomfortable. Part of the deal also included an oil shipment from China as a gift to North Korea. When it didn’t arrive, Sven and the others were temporarily held hostage by soldiers with machine guns. After a few hours, they were allowed to fly to China with King looking exactly like a man who knew just how close he had come to death.

 

 

Back in the UK, the Notts County dream was falling apart by November. King’s criminal past had been exposed by journalists. There was a winding-up order over unpaid taxes and the club hadn’t even paid the milkman’s bill. First London went into administration so that £5 million guarantee wasn’t worth the paper on which it was written. King and Willett both vanished leaving Trembling to captain the sinking ship.

County were taken over by another new owner, Ray Trew, in February 2010 with the club in debt to the tune of £7 million. They also discovered that not alone had Munto not invested a penny, King had drained £200,000 from the club’s accounts.

Despite the utter chaos off the field, the strong squad that Eriksson assembled still won the league that season and spent the next five years in League One. Ultimately, however, the debts caught up with them and County tumbled out of the Football League by 2019 for the first time in their illustrious history. Had the promises of ten years previously come to pass, the Magpies would have long been a Premier League club by then. They returned via the playoffs in 2023 and currently sit in sixth place in League Two.

Eriksson moved on to manage the Ivory Coast national team, Leicester City and in China. Sadly, he passed away last August. Campbell rejoined Arsenal that January for an unexpected late reprise in the top flight. Schmeichel spent the following season at Leeds United before going on to win the league with Leicester.

As for King, he eluded justice for another ten years, by which stage he had embarrassed Bahrain sufficiently with another scam for them to extradite him to Jersey on charges relating to embezzling up to £16 million from the hedge fund. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment in the Channel Islands for fraud and larceny, but only served two and has been a free man since 2021. He has yet to face any charges relating to Notts County or North Korea.

‘The Trillion Dollar Conman’ is a terrific read that rivals a James Bond plot and would be ridiculously far-fetched had it not all been true. There’s plenty more in this book to entertain and astound than what’s been covered here. It will resonate with fans of too many football clubs whose hopes have been raised and dashed by scammers and spoofers. We all want our turn to live the dream. Notts County’s turned into a nightmare.