Lai and associates bought the Peace stake for £188m this valued the club at something in the region of £213m.
Lai bought a club that was cash rich solvent and in the Premier League with near to zero upside potential.
By definition Football clubs are nearly always sold to billionaires because nobody else can afford to buy them so finding a billionaire or large corporation to "invest" is not a good thing because it is pretty much the only type of person or institution that can.
Villa were sold with a mountain of debt quite literally days away from administration. Have the new ownership spent more than £110m on cleaning up the mess they inherited ? Probably.
Fosun only spent £45m on buying Wolves. However but they spent another £38m on acquiring a 15% stake in the Mendes Agency with the option to increase that stake to 30%. The stake in Start SGPS is more valuable to Fosun than Wolves even today. The relationship between the two is host and parasite at the moment it is symbiotic but be in no doubt that Fosun will sell off and move to a new host when the moment is right.
Both however were bought in the Championship with lots of upside potential. Just getting promoted doubles the club's value overnight. A route it is open to profit. However failure to get promoted turns them into Derby or Sheffield Wednesday. Although Wolves could still be used as a player trading platform in the Championship.
Valid points Stan - thank you.
My point is that other clubs were available and changing hands at lower prices, albeit with debt attached to them, but also with history and potential.
For a smart businessman Lai seems to have bought a debt free club at an absolutely premium price, a price set by Peace. I realise that Lai did not have to take it, but he did and now we appear to be entering the wilderness years as far as club progression is concerned. If we do go down then I really fear for us, so the Allardyce 'gamble' has to work for all concerned.
To be fair to Peace, if he was approached by Fosun as widely rumoured and he turned them away, then it looks as though he helped the club dodge a bullet, although I suspect that it was more to do with profit margins as opposed to the future development of our club.
My issue with Peace is the way he went about his business, as a result of this we now have an owner who appears to be out of his depth and wanting all of his investment back. Peace put him there and rode off into the sunset. Ironically I don't think that we are any better or worse of with Lai; it would be exactly the same with Peace here. We are well and truly stuck.
Earlier in this thread someone mentioned true fans, we are all true fans but we cannot afford to buy the club sadly [well I cant anyway]. A true fan for me was someone like Sir Jack Hayward, a life long fan who put his money into the club he supported and wanted nothing back. Peace said he was a life long fan too didn't he?