The Long Read: A sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and fraud
Andy Pilley is going to prison for 14 years, and Fleetwood Town will not be the same again.
“A sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and fraud.”
His Honour Judge Knowles KC didn’t seem to be in the mood for mincing his words, and neither should he have been. The case against Andy Pilley, the former chairman of Fleetwood Town, was fairly damning. Between 2010 and 2019, annual turnover in Pilley's two Business Energy Solutions companies grew from around £15m to over £100m off the back of systematic fraud, mis-selling gas and electricity contracts while posting fake customer comments on websites.
The court found that a "salesforce of cold-calling liars and manipulators duped very large numbers of honest and decent proprietors" into "long and expensive contracts" for their gas and electricity, and that Pilley "devised and enforced an elaborate pretence that the sales team were independent of the supply companies" when, "the truth was that he owned them and called the shots."
Pilley was found guilty on two counts of running a business with the intention of defrauding creditors, one count of false representation and one count of being concerned with the retention of criminal property, and had been convicted at Preston Crown Court on the 23rd May, ahead of Wednesday’s sentencing. The cost of it all has been an extremely heavy one for the former Fleetwood Town chairman. Thirteen years in prison.
There’s quite a lot to unpick here.
The success that Andy Pilley bought to Fleetwood Town was very much out of line with the previously troubled history of football in this small town at the top end of the Fylde coast. It’s complicated. The original club, Fleetwood FC, was formed in 1908 but folded in 1928. Three years later another local club called Fleetwood Windsor Villa changed their name to Fleetwood FC, and the club was reborn.
They weren’t especially successful, but this Fleetwood FC were a solid enough semi-professional club, and in 1968 they were among the twenty founding members of the Northern Premier League. Fleetwood FC finished 10th in their first season, but this proved to be their best in their new league. They did win the NPL Cup in 1971, but after finishing bottom of the table for two seasons in a row–and three times in four years– they folded in 1976.
Fleetwood Town were formed the following year to replace this club. Founding members of the North West Counties League in 1982, they were promoted from its second to first division in 1984 and reached the final of the FA Vase at Wembley the following year, where they lost to Halesowen Town. Placed into the new Division One of the Northern Premier League, they finished as champions at the first attempt and went as high as 4th in the Premier Division–one level below the Conference–in 1991. But their descent was rapid. They changed their name to Fleetwood FC in 1993, and folded in 1996.
The following year, yet another new club was formed, this time called Fleetwood Wanderers, but they almost immediately changed their name to Fleetwood Freeport on account of a sponsorship deal. The club was promoted to the Premier Division of the North West Counties League in 1999 and changed their name to Fleetwood Town in 2002. That’s this Fleetwood Town, the Fleetwood Town that finished last season in 13th place in League One. That’s the one we’re talking about today.
Just so we’re clear.
By 2016, Pilley was telling The National that he’d spent £30m on the club. Three years earlier, he’d been telling the Daily Mail that it was £10m. The last available accounts suggested that Fleetwood Wanderers Ltd—the club still goes by its original 1977 name as a limited company—owed Pilley’s companies something in the region of £20m.
But the one figure that was consistent between these two articles was the 80 people quoted as having been in attendance at his first game, and the appeal of that story is obvious. This was a rags to riches story of a local boy done good who’d been prepared to put their money where their mouth was, becoming, through his businesses, one of the largest local employers at a time when this particular part of the world seemed to have been forgotten by political parties of all persuasions.
The football club was another manifestation of this. If nothing else, the First Division of the North West Counties League to the EFL in just eight years from 2005 to 2013 was certainly dramatic. The club’s Highbury ground was completely redeveloped, and the team spent just two seasons in each of the Northern Premier League Premier Division, the Conference North and the Conference before becoming the champions of each.
And it did feel at times as though, if they needed the sun to shine on them, it did. They invested £100,000 on a young striker from FC Halifax Town by the name of Jamie Vardy in August 2011, by the end of that season he’d scored 31 league goals to get the club promoted into the Football League for the first time, whereupon they immediately sold him for a non-league record transfer fee of £1m, rising to £1.7m with add-ons. Nice work, if you can get it.
But by that time, the cracks in the BES way of doing business were already starting to show, with stories having started to appear in the press a couple of years earlier accusing Pilley’s company of mis-selling them energy contracts. Further stories of this nature would continue to emerge, but none of this seemed likely to have an adverse effect upon the football club. After two seasons in the EFL Fleetwood were promoted to League One, and in 2016 Sir Alex Ferguson opened a state of the art training facility which cost the club £8m to build.
Once in League One they stayed there, even pushing into the play-offs in 2017 and 2020, although there were also close shaves with relegation on occasion, too. Broadly, they continued to punch above their weight in League One, but they were also plenty capable of causing controversy. Joey Barton was hired as the club’s manager in 2018, and marked his first season by being charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm on the Barnsley manager Daniel Stendel following a match between the two teams. Barton was later acquitted in court of criminal assault, but he’d gone from the club by this time.
And then there was the small matter of the 2019 general election. No-one would question the rights of anyone to express their political views publicly, but Pilley’s decision to post videos on the club’s social media channels and official website urging people to vote Conservative felt like a huge overreach:
What would happen to the football club is it will virtually, definitely lose its league status if the Labour Party was to be elected because the football club would lose its funding.
The football club would lose its funding from BES which is my core business.
So it’s very much in the best interests of Fleetwood Town that the Labour Party are not elected and the Conservatives are elected and they continue to back business and ultimately Fleetwood Town.
There is a real danger that, if the Labour Party are elected, then their manifesto clearly states that the energy industry would be nationalised.
And that would mean the loss of hundreds and hundreds of jobs locally.
Pilley had been out batting for Louise Thistlethwaite, the Conservative candidate for the Lancaster & Fleetwood seat, but his dubious use of the club’s social media channels–in short, official channels should never be used for party political purposes, regardless of which side of the political spectrum you’re on, it’s just plain unprofessional—wasn’t enough to get her over the line. On an otherwise stunning night for the party promising to, ahem, “get Brexit done”, Thistlethwaite didn’t win her seat.
Following the confirmation of the sentencing, Fleetwood Town themselves seemed–unsurprisingly, considering everything–in a hurry to distance the club from the pickle in which the owner has found himself. In a curt statement issued following his sentencing, they said:
Fleetwood Town Football Club acknowledges the sentencing in the court case involving former club chairman, Andy Pilley.
The club would like to reiterate convictions are against individuals and not Fleetwood Town FC, or any of the businesses associated with them, and will continue to operate as normal.
Fleetwood Town remain in communication with the EFL and will be making no further comment at this time.
Well yes, it is true to say that the charges were brought against the individual rather than the football club, but let’s not start pretending that Pilley, his companies, and the fortunes of Fleetwood Town weren’t all deeply intertwined. After all, in December 2019 any future nationalisation of utility companies would have meant that Fleetwood Town would “virtually, definitely lose its league status.”
Pilley resigned from the board of directors of the club upon his conviction, but this can hardly be considered some sort of selfless act of falling upon his sword. Even looking at it from a football perspective only, Appendix 3 of the EFL’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test prevents “anyone who is subject to a ‘Disqualifying Condition’ being involved in or influencing the management or administration of a club”. A criminal conviction is listed within the definition of a “disqualifying condition”. In other words, he didn’t have much of a choice but to walk away from the football club.
This state of affairs may or may not have led to the situation in which two of Pilley’s children, Melissa and Jamie, were appointed as directors of Fleetwood Wanderers Ltd for a day during May, even though one of them is 26 years old and the other is 19. What was that about? Both of them had their directorships terminated the following day, on the same day as papa.
It is also notable from those filings that Philip Brown was appointed as a director shortly afterwards. Fleetwood’s statement may have sought to put a little distance between the club and the disgrace of its owner, but while Brown’s LinkedIn confirms that he has been vice-chairman of the club since 1997, he was also the Head of Commercial for BES Utilities for 14 years before retiring in 2021.
None of this, of course, means that he is implicated in the crimes for which Pilley and others have been convicted, but this connection alone demonstrates that if the club is to unpick its connections to Pilley and his welter of companies completely, there could be a lot of work to do.
But while we’re on the subject of Fit & Proper Owners & Directors, one extremely curious detail to come out of Pilley’s case was the fact that he’d previously imprisoned for four months in 1998 for conspiracy to steal from the Post Office while working as a counter clerk. Considering the nature of that crime, it is worth asking the question of how he was allowed into such a position at Fleetwood in the first place.
Fortunately, Martin Calladine was on hand with an explanation (Twitter account required). Because of the length of Pilley’s sentence, and despite the fact that his conviction was for a crime of dishonesty, the conviction was considered “spent” and doesn’t seem to ever have had to be disclosed to the authorities.
Since Fleetwood Town were only in the North West Counties League at the time that he bought the club, there would have been no ownership test for him in 2003, but it still remains surprising that this wasn’t revisited as the club shot up through the divisions. As Calladine explains, “The EFL has broadened the range of criminal convictions that count as disqualifying conditions, but it remains only unspent ones” that have to be taken into account.
So yet again we are left to reflect upon the loopholes inherent in processes that have always existed as if under some form of protest being—and always having been—so glaringly obvious. Would an independent regulator even do things that much differently? We shall see.
Meanwhile back in the present day, what the future holds for Fleetwood Town is just about anybody’s guess. Pilley’s conviction and the length of his sentence is a serious matter which reflects extremely badly on the EFL—whether this is fair or not is at least partly irrelevant—so they are likely to be laser-focused over what happens with regard to the ownership and finances of the club now. That independent regulator is circling, The EFL can’t afford to take their eye off the ball over what happens next, here.
But such is the byzantine nature of the web of companies that Pilley owns that disentangling him from Fleetwood Town could prove to be extremely difficult. We’ve already seen two of his kids as directors of the club for 24 hours. This seems like as good a time as any to remind everybody that shadow directors are usually treated as directors for the purposes of football governance.
Also, regardless of the technicalities the case, it can only be assumed that this whole affair has had a damaging effect on the business of BES Utilities to some extent or another. At the moment they’re still trading, and in November 2021 Pilley was being publicly bullish about being about to withstand rapidly increasing energy prices, telling the Blackpool Gazette that, “Fleetwood will not be affected at all by this because BES is absolutely fine”.
But what happens, should there be a class action lawsuit by those who were ripped off? Or if adverts for those who were missold energy contracts to call this number start appearing on radio? They already have a Facebook group, after all. And considering everything that we now know, would it even be wise for Pilley’s companies to continue to put money into his football club in any way whatsoever?
For the year to the end of April 2022 BES Commercial Energy made a pre-tax loss of £200,000, compared to a pre-tax profit of £2.5m the previous year. These accounts were signed off on the 28th April 2023. Twenty-five days later, Andrew Pilley was convicted. Pilley has been recommended to spend a minimum of 9 years in prison by the presiding judge, but regardless of what happens to him now, how could anybody have any confidence whatsoever to deal with any of his companies?
It remains to be seen what happens to them next, but we do already know of one further ramification for Pilley. In September 2021 he sued Cheshire West & Chester Council’s Trading Standards Office for £10m for Human Rights breaches, trespass and misfeasance in public office over their raids on his offices in 2016.
Pilley described the raids as “a shocking waste of time and public money” and said at the time that “We totally deny any wrongdoing and will continue to fight for justice.” Upon the service of justice—albeit probably not the sort he had in mind in September 2021—the verdict of which was withheld until the conviction was announced, so as not to influence the criminal trial. Obviously, he’d lost that too.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Fleetwood Town aren’t the only club caught up in this, or not caught up in it. By a very striking irony indeed, on the very day that Pilley’s sentence was being handed down Fleetwood were in Ireland to play Waterford FC, Pilley’s other club. Fleetwood won 5-1.
Waterford are six times Irish champions, and the first team that Manchester United played in defence of their 1968 European Cup, but who ended their 2022 season–it’s a summer league in Ireland–as runners-up in the League of Ireland Division One before losing in the play-off final to UCD, and who are currently in second place again this time around. They also issued a statement on the matter:
Waterford Football Club acknowledges the sentencing in the court case involving owner Andy Pilley.
The club would like to reiterate convictions are against individuals and not Waterford FC, or any of the businesses associated with them, and will continue to operate as normal.
The club will make no further comment at this time.
If that all sounds rather familiar, it’s probably because it’s almost word-for-word identical to the Fleetwood Town statement, only with the EFL reference missing for obvious reasons. At least Waterford’s shirt sponsors don’t seem to be related to him at all. Hopefully arrangements are in place to ensure that everybody who needs to be paid at that club will be.
Meanwhile, the response of Fleetwood supporters on The Cod Army Facebook page has been much as you’d expect in the 21st century. “Questions need to be answered why he’s received such a ridiculous sentence yet Paedophiles get half of this if not less” seems like a fairly standard comment from that page on this subject, so let’s have a go at answering that question.
It should go without saying that judges don’t just pull random numbers out of the air when they’re deciding for how long someone should be sent to prison. There are sentencing guidelines for fraud, and there are sentencing guidelines for money laundering.
And when you start to dig into it, it’s not difficult to see where such a high sentence came from in this case. Two main factors are used, harm and culpability. The fact that the amount concerned was over £500,000 would put him straight into the top tier for harm. According to the Sentencing Council, culpability is determined by the following factors:
A leading role where offending is part of a group activity
Involvement of others through pressure, influence
Abuse of position of power or trust or responsibility
Sophisticated nature of offence/significant planning
Criminal activity conducted over sustained period of time
Argue amongst yourself over how many of these apply in this case, though we can say with near-certainty that it was more than none and quite likely at least three. Leading role? Tick. Significant planning? Tick. Sustained period of time? Tick.
The maximum permissible sentence for fraud or conspiracy to defraud is ten years in prison. For money laundering, it’s fourteen. Thirteen years is self-evidently at the stiffer end of the range of sentences that could have been applied, but it’s in line with sentencing guidelines for the offences for which Pilley was convicted.
And yes, I do have sympathy with the club’s supporters. It is difficult for outsiders to get their heads around what happened to the town of Fleetwood. A 2006 government memorandum reported that the demise of the fishing industry had cost the area 8,000 jobs, while the closure of a nearby ICI plant had cost a further 4,500 job losses in the wider region. In the 2021 census, the population of Fleetwood was reported as 26,232.
It would be facile to suggest that football could somehow heal this decades-long decline, but it can put a smile on the face, and especially if that team is winning. It can be respite for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. It can restore a little local pride. It can give you a reason to believe that your home is capable of much better than the perception of outsiders.
And when the man behind it all just happens to be local and one of the biggest employers in the region, it could even start to feel as though you’ve collectively built it yourselves. Others might have disliked the way in which they achieved it, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the last twenty years have been very good to Fleetwood Town supporters.
So when that man is established to be a crook, it hurts. It’s not about promotion or relegation, or the new number nine, or how many points you need to make the play-offs, it’s something much deeper inside you. It’s that feeling of having been hoodwinked, even if you haven’t quite been in the most obvious sense. It’s the knowledge that, no matter what happens now, something won’t quite be the same again in the future.
At present, there is nothing to suggest any immediate threat to the club. Nobody knows how this ends up yet, but as of this precise moment in time there’s nothing to suggest any immediate danger. Highbury Stadium is owned by the local council, so that should be safe. But otherwise, no-one can really say with any degree of certainty where the club ends up from here. At this stage, it would feel as though a sale of the club and a complete severance with Pilley’s companies would likely be the most prudent path to follow.
Because it doesn’t feel as though the EFL can just allow Fleetwood Town’s ownership to be passed to someone to tend it for Andy Pilley until he gets out of prison. Much of what happens next regarding Fleetwood Town will come down to the attitudes of both the EFL and the club itself. The Andy Pilley years at Fleetwood Town are coming to an end, but how complete will that ultimate severance be? When I said there’s a lot to unpick here, I wasn’t joking.