Morecambe, Wigan & the strange case of Sarbjot Johal

Formerly linked with Morecambe and then with Wigan, who is this mysterious 'tycoon'?

What is a ‘tycoon’? Well, in one sense it’s very obvious. A tycoon is anyone who has succeeded in business or industry and has become very rich and powerful as a result. But in another, it’s somewhat muddier. There are no qualifications required to call yourself a tycoon, or even to have it claimed on your behalf, and to a point this is fine. 

The issue comes when claims start to be made about the wealth accumulated by an individual but this can’t be properly substantiated, and especially when someone in that precise position starts to make offers to buy beloved community institutions while raising more questions than their public profiles answer.

Life in the EFL has been tough for Morecambe since they were promoted into the League through the play-offs in 2007. Over 16 years they’ve only finished above halfway in whichever division they’ve been in on five occasions, and on two of those they finished in 11th place. But they were promoted to League One via the play-offs in 2021, a unique season in that it was played entirely behind closed doors, and since supporters were readmitted at The Globe Arena crowds have more than doubled, from 2,228 during the 2019/20 season to 4,572 during the 2022/23 season. 

Supporters of other, bigger clubs might scoff at clubs of this size being in the same division as former Premier League clubs such as Sheffield Wednesday, Derby County and Ipswich Town, but it’s difficult to say what else the town itself could have done to grow the club. Even taking into account that 2021 promotion, doubling home attendances in three years is a significant achievement. 

But the first signs of what was to follow came in August last year with the issuance of a winding up petition against the Worcester Warriors rugby union club over unpaid taxes. Warriors were owned by the Morecambe owners Colin Goldring and Jason Whittingham, but in a statement the club was keen to “reassure supporters that this has no impact on Morecambe FC” and that: “Our finances are independent, as are our budgets. We do not owe Worcester Warriors any monies and the only shared position is that we have owners in common.”

Worcester Warriors did not survive. They were put into administration on the 26th September and with the RFU having suspended the club from playing all contracts were torn up at the start of October. The club was disbanded on the 9th February 2023, with all attempts at restarting the club having been rejected by rugby union’s governing body. Their debts totalled more than £30m. 

It was announced that Morecambe FC were up for sale on the 2nd September, with the statement issued also confirming that Goldring and Whittingham would be resigning from the club’s board of directors. This was confirmed on Companies House the following day, and by the start of January the club seemed to have a preferred bidder. It had been reported that there was interest in buying the club from the boxer Tyson Fury, a local who has put sponsorship money into the club before, but rather than Fury, attention was largely focused on a 20-year old whose business record didn’t seem to quite tally up with the claims being made on his behalf.

So, who is this business genius who’s found a shortcut to making a lot of money when this seems to be as difficult as ever for many? Who is this great tycoon? This business genius?  Well, we can say with a degree of certainty that Sarbjot Johal is 21 years old, and that he was born in Gravesend in Kent but now lives in the West Midlands. He owns two soft drinks brands, Vitanic and Lovely Drinks, but from here on things start to get…complicated. 

Many of the claims made on his behalf seem to stem from this article on the Indian version of Entrepreneur, which was published, coincidentally I’m sure, seven days after the announcement that Morecambe Football Club was up for sale. In this article, it was claimed that, “Immediately after launching, stock began flying off the shelves, thanks to its unique composition and celebrity endorsements”. Who these celebrity endorsements were from isn’t clear, as no record of them seems to exist.

There are problems with several of the claims made in this article, the most fanciful of which is that “the company is on track to surpass a £1 billion valuation by Q3 2025”, which goes unchallenged. Johal can value it at whatever he likes, but that’s a very different question to what that valuation is based upon and whether anybody would pay it. 

Companies House shows that these two companies have just three employees and fixed assets of under £200,000 between them. If “Lovely Drinks is already replacing various drinks companies in major hospitality outlets around the globe by offering competitive prices and same-day delivery in major cities”, it didn’t seem to be doing the finances of Lovely Drinks Ltd any good, and Vitanic’s haven’t been any better.

Furthermore, rather than “flying off the shelves”, there is no evidence to suggest that a single bottle of Vitanic has ever been sold, and certainly not in the United Kingdom. The only product showing on the company’s own website is shown as “out of stock”. How long has it been like that? It was showing as out of stock on the 5th January 2023. It was in stock on the 7th September 2020, though interestingly the price per bottle has reduced from £13.00 a bottle to £7.99 a bottle over that time. Perhaps he’s found a way of defying the nosebleed-inducing price rises of the last few months as well. 

The Lovely Drinks website does seem to have stock on it (and there are plenty of photos of him with his arms on it, leaning on it, or whatever), but the fact that it says on the homepage that “Delivery is usually within 3-5 days though due to the Corona-19 situation this may vary”, it seems fair to ask whether anything on this website is actually up-to-date. These hospitality deals sound like the sort of big deal that any company aspiring to grow would be shouting about from the rooftops, but their LinkedIn is more or less blank.

And when you look at the Companies House details for Lovely Drinks Ltd, it seems to have been owned by three people from its incorporation in 2007 until Johal took control of it in April 2022. This was clearly a respected company (there are excellent reviews of their products to view online), but the last set of accounts simply do not show companies heading anywhere near to the claims being made on their behalf. And Johal would know this, since he signed off on these accounts. Both sets, for both companies. 

But hang on a minute, there. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a fantasy, some sort of act of illusion, but it’s clear that Johal has money. Or at least, he wished to give that impression. Curiously, the Instagram account referred to in previous articles about him has since been scrubbed completely clean, but it has already been documented elsewhere that there were pictures on this account showing some of the trappings of wealth. The cherished car registration plate that was shown on his Instagram of “53 NGH” is correctly attached to a Rolls Royce. That plate was sold at auction for £61,010, again in April 2022, shortly after Lovely Drinks Limited became his. Why was this young man spending so much money at this time, and why has he removed all the documentation of it since? 

The details of a possible explanation are hidden in Johal’s Instagram profile, which reads only “@sarbcapital”. Johal is listed as a company director of Sarb Capital Project-PM Ltd, which was set up in January 2023 with £100 in share capital—when it comes to making that billion pound valuation, every little helps—but what “Project PM” might consist of remains a mystery. “Purchase Morecambe”? Who knows, and as a newly-incorporated company, there will be no accounts for another six months. The other company, Sarb Capital, have their first set of accounts due at the start of October. 

But again, trying to establish Sarb Capital’s legitimacy is difficult. Their LinkedIn account claims to have 51-200 employees and the website address doesn’t link to anything. A WhoIs search for ther domain name—which can bring up the name of the owner of a website, though this isn’t difficult to hide—brings up that the status of this domain is “ClientTransferProhibited”, which according to Icann, the body which governs domain name conventions, confirms as the following: “This domain name status indicates that it is not possible to update the domain, which can help prevent unauthorized updates resulting from fraud. If you do want to update your domain, you must first contact your registrar and request that they remove this status code.” 

There are two other names connected with the company, and they don’t inspire much confidence either. Here’s Global Head of Digital Niyah Smith being interviewed by the BBC over the eight and a half years that he was sentenced to in prison in 2012 over charges of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. This was a long time ago and Smith was a young man then. Hopefully, he’s wiser now.

But it is reasonable to ask how these three musketeers are going to have this company worth £1bn by 2025. The other associated name, Saida Banks, describes himself on Twitter as “talent care specialist across sports, music and brands” and is described as the “Sport Director” of Sarb Capital, none of which explains why what may or may not be a venture capital company would need one of these in the first place, or again what his qualifications for such a position might be.

Others were investigating this case earlier this year, and one—the Twitter account SST Investing—found another website called sarblimited.com, which was taken down for a few weeks at the start of this year before being reinstated again. This is a cryptocurrency trading account which promises zero trading fees and weekly earnings of “up to 50%”. Well, if these guys have cracked the secret to doubling your money every fortnight through investment, then small wonder they’ve put a billion pound valuation on it all by 2025. 

If what they’re saying is true there, Sarb Limited is the business equivalent to opening a factory printing licenses to print money. Alternatively, it could all be yet another hot bullshit crypto ponzi scheme. Their completely bonkers “investment plans” would seem to indicate the latter. Everything about this company—the name, the fact that they list their office as being in Edgbaston, Birmingham—says that this is related to Johal, but the “Sarb Limited” name has been registered at Companies House to somebody completely different in a different part of the country. 

The EFL appeared unimpressed by all of this, and a couple of weeks after all this came to light issued a somewhat testy statement confirming that they hadn’t received all the documentation required to approve Johal as owner of the Morecambe. The club was relegated back to League Two at the end of last season, and this situation still seems to be unresolved. 

Meanwhile, one of 2023’s basket cases du jour, Wigan Athletic, made a somewhat strange announcement at the start of June. Wigan were also relegated at the end of last season and will be starting next season in League One on minus eight points, and having had ongoing issues with ensuring that their players and staff get paid. But on the 4th June, Wigan issued a statement confirming that, “A deal has been agreed in principle for the sale of Wigan Athletic Football Club to a prospective new buyer – subject to EFL approval.”

The following day, Beyond Radio reported that Johal was the interested party. They stated that Johal had “invested funds into the club [Morecambe]  twice in recent weeks, after player and staff wages were delayed in March, and then again last month, when the Shrimps announced Sarb Capital had made a ‘further significant contribution’ into the club” and that, “Both financial injections were in return for share capital”. The following day, the claim was repeated by the BBC. 

Nine days later, Wigan had another announcement to make, this time that  a company backed by the local billionaire Mike Danson had purchased the club, finally ending the financial uncertainty which has been hanging over that club for several months. Danson, who already owns 25% of Wigan Warriors RLFC, would seem to be a far better fit for the club than a 21 year-old who hadn’t over the previous few months managed to satisfy the EFL that he had the financial wherewithal to run Morecambe. 

The day after the BBC’s report, the Daily Express were back on the case, saying that now Tyson Fury had a second chance to purchase the club, but this was an entirely speculative piece, quoting Fury from the point at which he was in negotiation with the club itself in 2022 and, it seemed, based on little more than the previous BBC and Beyond Radio reports. But at least Wigan Athletic—who have had one hell of a time of it since winning the FA Cup against Manchester City in 2013—have been saved and will start next season in a more positive state of mind, points deduction notwithstanding. 

But what of Morecambe? Last week, CEO Ben Sadler told Beyond Radio that talks were still ongoing, but at this point there seems little reason to believe that Sarbjot Johal is much beyond a tyre-kicker who’d like to buy a football club but who has been unable over a period of months to demonstrate that he has the means to do so. And in the meantime, Morecambe FC prepare for life back in League Two with little clue as to what the future holds.

As a quick aside, although the research work on this piece has been independently sourced, it wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible work of Martin Calladine, SST Investing, and Tom Bowen.