The fraudster, his son, the EFL and the Companies

The names above the door have changed, but it all looks very familiar. Why on earth have the EFL have approved such an agreement?

Late in the afternoon on a Thursday just after the end of the domestic league season isn’t a particularly bad time if you have news that may be better off buried, and so it was that on this particular Thursday late afternoon Fleetwood Town, freshly relegated from League Two, had some to announce.

Since last summer the club has been owned by a convicted fraudster but it isn’t any more. Now it’s run by… his son and a bunch of his other former associates, and as if that wasn’t enough, this all seems to have been happily waved through by the EFL.

It’s worth, at a moment like this, taking a moment to consider the scale of what Pilley was up to in the first place. His prosecution was brought by National Trading Standards, who accused him (and others) of fraudulent trading, fraud by false representation and being involved in the acquisition, retention, use or control of the proceeds of fraudulently mis-sold energy contracts.

The court heard that at the heart of the fraud was a web of interconnected companies that misled innocent small businesses across the UK. What they’d been up to is perhaps best summed up by the sentencing remarks at the time of the trial’s conclusion:

At the heart of the fraud was a web of interconnected companies that misled innocent small businesses across the UK. Through sham company structures associated with Business Energy Solutions Ltd, BES Commercial Electricity Ltd and Commercial Power Ltd, Pilley and his associates were responsible for targeting small business owners and deceiving them into signing long-term energy contracts between 2014 and 2016.

His Honour Judge Knowles KC also said:

Cold-calling liars and manipulators duped very large numbers of honest and decent proprietors of sandwich shops, hair salons, small hotels and the like into long and expensive contracts for their gas and electricity. The bills they had to pay came to tens of millions of pounds…Pilley devised and enforced an elaborate pretence that the sales team were independent of the supply companies. The truth was that he owned them and he called the shots.

Pilley was imprisoned for 13 years for his role in it all.

The group of energy companies Pilley founded in 2002, BES Utilities, remained deeply intertwined with the club on which he spent £30m prior to his conviction. Its logo was on the team’s shirts and the company headquarters is based in the stadium.

The BES Utilities group includes BES Commercial Electricity Ltd and Business Energy Solutions, both of which remain based in the Parkside Stand at Fleetwood Town Football Club and both of which have accounts that are overdue with Companies House, having been made up to the end of April.

So, let’s have a look at this new board of directors at Fleetwood Town, then. What does this bright new future look like?

Jamie Pilley: Jamie is 27, and the son of convicted fraudster Andy Pilley. Despite his relatively tender years, Jamie is currently an active director of 17 different companies, including Business Energy Solutions Ltd, BES Commercial Electricity Ltd and Commercial Power Ltd, all three of which were involved in the fraud outlined above. Jamie was appointed as directors of these companies around six weeks before his father was convicted. Jamie’s first public statement made no reference to his father whatsoever.

Steven Curwood: Steven is 51 years old and is a director of four different companies including the EFL itself, where he’s been a board member since July 2019. The EFL’s website describes him as, “Responsible for overseeing Fleetwood Town’s activities on and off the pitch since 2008, Chief Executive Officer Steven Curwood joined the Club’s board as a Director in May 2023 after 15 years in his role.” Curiously, Companies House only has him listed as a director since December 2015. He also signed off on the last set of company accounts (PDF), which showed a debt of £36m, of which £30m is owed to, you guessed it, Andy Pilley.

Philip Brown: Philip is 61 years old and, unlike Steven, actually has been a director of the club since 2008. Philip was also a director of Business Energy Solutions Ltd from January 2008 to August 2023. He’s also a director of the Fleetwood Town Community Trust.

Will Watt: Will is the only one of the new directors to have his own Wikipedia page. Previously a journalist with the Blackpool Gazette, in the summer of 2016 he became the Head of Communications at Fleetwood Town. Six months later he was promoted to be the club's Head of First Team Operations and Communications, and in February 2020 hed became the club's Head of Football Operations. There is no record on Companies House of him being a director of any other companies.

Peter Murphy: According to Fleetwood’s statement, the EFL’s agreement to the takeover “includes adherence to certain undisclosed financial requirements and the appointment of an Independent Director to Fleetwood Town’s Board – confirmed as the Chairman of the Club’s Community Trust, Peter Murphy.” This is Peter’s only current active directorship, though he remains active on social media and you can check out his opinions here. He was a Conservative councillor until 2017.

So, to clarify: one of the new directors is the convicted fraudster Andy Pilley’s son. Three of the other four were all brought into the club while Pilley senior was running it. Three of the five were directors of companies directly related to the fraud. One is a director of the EFL itself.

All of this raises questions, some of them very obvious. Firstly, considering the fraud and the companies that it involved, what on earth is the idea behind allowing the son of the fraudster and a whole group of others already deeply connected with him to run this club? What is this supposed to change? Or is it just supposed to change as little as humanly possible?

And secondly, what fresh hell is going on with an actual director of the EFL who was at the same time a director of Fleetwood Town alongside Andy Pilley being appointed to this board? What degrees of separation have been put in place between Andy Pilley and this lot? Do they have any concrete assurances whatsoever that he will not simply be barking out orders from his prison cell? And how could they even prove it if he was?

To be clear, shadow directorship is real, and the EFL already know this. A shadow director may be defined as anyone who is directly calling the shots at a company or an area within the company, even though they’re not listed with Companies House. We know they already know this because it’s in their rulebook. According to the EFL’s own definitions (PDF):

‘Director’ means any Person occupying the position of director of a Club whose particulars are registered or registerable pursuant to Section 162 of the 2006 Act and includes a shadow director, that is to say, a Person in accordance with whose directions or instructions the directors of the Club are accustomed to act, or a person having Control over a Club, or a person exercising the powers that are usually associated with the powers of a director of a company.

So, what safeguards are in place to ensure that a convicted fraudster isn’t de facto running a League One club from his prison cell? What message does all of this send to anybody who’s looking on at professional football with a view to regulating it? Do the EFL not realise just what a conflict of interest it looks like if one of their directors is involved in something like this? Do they not realise how compromised this makes them look?

After all, this club grew fat off the largesse of their owner, and the money that Andy Pilley made—or at least a proportion of it—came as a result of fairly despicable behaviour. How can we say for sure that none of this money came from this fraudulent behaviour, and what in the world are people who were on the receiving end of it supposed to make of all this?

And they wonder why people believe that the game in this country is in such dire need of effective regulation. Remember all this, the next time the EFL put on their serious face and start blowharding away about Very Serious Things or issuing points deductions like confetti in the hope that it’ll make them look like Serious Big Boy Regulators. They’re not fit for purpose, just like all the other vampires who’ve clamped their teeth into our game and won’t let go until they’ve broken it completely.