At last, it seems as if someone looking for the answers to the Portsmouth “problem” is asking the right questions.

As intimated in this column last week, there are questions to be asked about the links between some of the protagonists in the affair, especially since the largely Israeli consortium, led by an Arab, took over last autumn.

And Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) asked some of them in the High Court on Tuesday.

 

Their representative, Gregory Mitchell QC, summed it up precisely and concisely when he said: “We say there are serious questions that arise and require full investigation as to what financial dealings there have been between the various different owners of the club and between the club and its owners.

Indeed it is. Companies like Portpin Limited and Falcondrone Limited are registered offshore – if football were to “come home” again like it did in 1996, it would have to hop on a plane to the British Virgin Islands – and are thus beyond the investigatory scope of the football authorities and, perhaps more importantly, the dogged scrutiny of the better football investigative journalists.

There certainly has to be some reason why former owner Sacha Gaydamak decided last August to sell to the balloonish Sulaiman Al-Fahim, rather than the Israeli consortium to which the hapless Al-Fahim eventually had to sell.

Gaydamak claimed in a January interview with a Pompey fans’ website that it was pure co-incidence that at least four of the people involved in suing his father Arcadi last summer over a business deal gone wrong, should involve themselves firstly with Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem (owner: Arcadi Gaydamak) and then Portsmouth (owner: Sacha Gaydamak).

The only other thing that the likes of Balram Chainrai (Pompey’s most-recent current owner) and his associates have in common is a relative non-interest in football.

Yet, here they are, the epicentre of the EPL’s biggest financial earthquake. If it doesn’t make you think, it should.

Good luck to HMRC, and anyone else wanting to get under the shroud of mystery that is Portsmouth Football Club.