Huw Jenkins has finally thrown himself on his own sword at Swansea City and it seems his American paymasters’ dare to sell young starlet Dan James was the final straw, Jenkins thwarting the sale at the last minute before jumping ship…or being pushed…
Jenkins stood down just hours after the defeat to Bristol City left the Swans treading water in mid-table and a couple of days after a traumatic transfer deadline day that saw three more first teamers shipped out and another two all but gone until dramatic last minute U-turns. With no replacements brought in the fact that two players – young winger James and club captain Leroy Fer – ended up staying was heralded by the club’s pet poodle press crowd as a massive positive.
Jenkins seemingly thought different and its said that his actions directly led to the two players remaining against the Americans’ wishes and this finally made the Chairman’s position untenable a full year after he’d made that very admission.
In typical Swansea City fashion the noises coming out of the club are confusing and contradictory and it is difficult to tell whether Jenkins resigned on a point of principle (bit late for that even if you did, fella!) or was terminated with extreme prejudice by Hedgefund owners annoyed that their laughable Leeds deal to cash in on James was torpedoed by their pet patsy Chairman/employee.
Jenkins got his defence in first, releasing a resignation statement to the media that was loaded with self-praise and lamentation that his role had been eroded and he no longer had control. Well Huw, that’s what happens when you sell a controlling level of shares AND voting rights too…you might have retained the role of Chairman but you were still nothing more than an employee from the moment YOU handed control to a pair of imbeciles and the twenty odd celebrity dentists and C list American celebrities behind them.
“Finally I can sit back no longer and hide behind my position and stay true to myself and my beliefs,” he lamented, despite the obvious fact that he’s been more than happy to do just that for the last two and a half years, trousering well over a million quid in wages at a time when catastrophic cash savings were required to keep the club afloat.
A couple of hours later the club issued its own statement on the Chairman’s resignation which you can read in full HERE
Now the tone of that statement and lines like “However, it has reached a stage where the way Swansea City has been run on a day-to-day basis has to change” more than imply that Jenkins was given the old Spanish archer ( El Bow ) as a result of HIS failings in the transfer window. It even had a Press pet poodle in the shape of Rob Phillips tweeting his confusion!
In the end though, whether he jumped in protest at the depth of the savage cuts in this latest transfer window or was pushed out for dissent it doesn’t really matter. Either way he’s no longer Chairman and the days of him defending the Americans to the hilt whilst they steadfastly refused to bow to enormous pressure to get rid of him are over.
With both buyers AND sellers facing potential legal action from the Supporters Trust it lends an even more fascination dynamic to any court proceedings involving the three parties. “No honour amongst thieves” and “enemy of my enemy is my friend” are two sayings that spring to mind!
One thing I want to make very clear is this: even if Jenkins has gone out of protest at the potential sale of James and Fer and/or the wider running of the club it does NOT make him some sort of hero!
Jacks, never forget that Jenkins and his accomplice Dineen were in the perfect position to see through the promise of our club being safe for generations through the protections a strong shareholding Supporters Trust would provide. But between the two of them they engineered a sale that made them incredibly rich and retained all their perks of position through outlandishly salaried jobs – and all they had to do was systematically dismantle the safeguards a strong Trust would bring.
Just think…the sort of decisions that Jenkins is implying are now going on above his head could have been stopped by him and Dineen teaming up with the Trust if they hadn’t sold their voting rights too and altered the Articles of Association.
Can you imagine how much safer we would be if the Trust had a 25% shareholding right now? And it would have had Jenkins and Dineen not activated the very Shareholders Agreement they deny existed when selling in order to prevent Mel Nurse gifting his 5% stake to the Trust.
Before the takeover was ratified there were again multiple opportunities to get the fans stake to the magical mark as the Trust wrote to all shareholders imploring them to do a deal for enough shares to take the 21% stake up to the far better legally protected 25%…Dineen couldn’t even be bothered to dignify the Trust with a reply and Twitter shows he denied ever receiving the registered letters. When it was pointed out the letters were emailed to him too and he conceded he’d received them he decided to block me in order to end the conversation!
Make no mistake, led by Jenkins and Dineen the sellers knew that the sale to Kaplan and Levien could have catastrophic consequences for Swansea City Football Club AND THEY DID NOT CARE. Making sure the deal went through was all that counted and making sure the Americans had TOTAL control is their own doing, they manufactured that situation in order to maximise the profit they made when selling.
So it’s a little bit late for Jenkins to make out that he disagrees with the way things are being run when he allowed these idiots free reign in the first place, spent two and a half years hovering up a huge salary to implement their commands and as recently as four weeks ago was telling us all in the official programme that the swingeing cuts that he simply now disagrees with were really a plan for promotion this year.
Jenkins is like the football equivalent of the Liberal Democrats…apologising for the vicious excesses of a Tory Government that they put into power by agreeing a coalition so that they themselves could finally have a bit of power with Cabinet positions.
Just like students will never forgive Nick Clegg I will never forgive Jenkins for what he’s done to the Swans, deliberately, just to make himself filthy rich.
Many people now fear that things will get worse without Jenkins there to curb the excesses of the Americans; better the Devil you know, they say.
I disagree.
Jenkins has been complicit with the Americans from the start, he’s been Chairman over the period of our demise and he’s only bitching now because the Yanks took away his access to his very own real life version of Football Manager.
The truth is, whether Jenkins is there or not we will continue to be s shambles on and off the field until the Americans decide its time for an exit strategy of their own.
And as I’ve said many times, this club cannot begin to heal the wounds that are tearing it apart without the banishment of the sell outs that put us in harm’s way and then laughed in our faces by continuing to coin it in and give it large in the Director’s Box even as the club meekly surrendered its Premier League place.
Jenkins’ departure is like one of the bullets being removed from the patient as it lies on the operating table; we need another bullet removed now with the immediate departure of Dineen – I’m sure the £250k a year given to the failure of a Commercial Director in return for his “commercial consultancy” services could be better used by a club desperate to raise cash by selling anything with a pulse.
For today though I’ll just reflect on Jenkins’ departure with grim satisfaction. I have no intention of rewriting history and will always freely acknowledge the leading part Jenkins played in the most successful period in the clubs history. Equally, history will judge him (and the other sellers) as the club visibly crumbles before our eyes. The judgement of history will be even harsher if the Trust situation results in legal action and more bombshells come out in court along the lines of made up Board meeting minutes to try and illegally oust two fellow directors.
There was a time when the departure of Huw Jenkins would have brought nothing but warm plaudits for someone that had worked with the Trust and fellow Board members to oversee unparalleled success for the Swans but his sad transformation from a Jack to a Judas has scuppered the eloquent epitaph.
One greedy bastard is now out of our club…only several more to go…