Thread by @uglygame

Wish the club the best, but the reality of the new owner's business track record doesn't seem to match the rhetoric.
1/

https://twitter.com/Blyth_Spartans/status/1760280374117072946

The announcement describes him as being of "Winners Worldwide," implying that this is the most significant part of empire as a "businessman, angel investor and philanthropist." Winners Worldwide is an 11-month-old limited company with £1 of share capital.
2/

From what I can tell looking at Companies House, Mr Liaquat has founded 8 companies, including Winners Worldwide. Four of those have been dissolved. Of the four active companies, two are facing strike off for non-filing of accounts or confirmation statements. And...
3/

As far as I can tell, only *one* of Mr Irfan's eight companies has *ever* filed a set of accounts at Companies House. That company,
Your City Location Ltd, filed two sets of dormant accounts and two microcompany accounts.

4/…te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/113499…

Those accounts - the only two I can find on record for Mr Irfan's businesses - do not seem to suggest an economic powerhouse. To say the least.
5/

Now it may, of course, be the case that he has other sources of wealth and more than delivers on his multi-hyphenate self-description, but I couldn't immediately see what that would be. Doesn't mean it isn't there, though.
6/

Doesn't mean he won't be a good owner, of course, and I obviously wish such a famous club well. But I think it's always worth doing a brief check, when someone buys a club, that the things they say about themselves and their wealth seem to be backed up by objective evidence.
7/7

PS: Apologies to Mr Liaquat, halfway through the thread, I switched from calling him Mr Liaquat to Mr Irfan, which is his first name. My bad.

Update: I said I'd only found one of Mr Liaquat's companies that filed accounts at Companies House. In fact, when that company did, it was after he had sold the company. And so, I think it's right to say that not one of Mr Liaquat's companies has ever filed accounts at CH.

Update: I have identified an additional company of which Mr Liaquat was a director. This company, DOM ASSET MANAGEMENT LIMITED, is in voluntary liquidation and appears to have debts exceeding £440k.

Liaquat was never an owner of the company, but he was appointed a director with five other people at the same time. The others subsequently resigned and he remains the sole director.

According to the liquidator's "statement of affairs" the company has assets of over £360k, but this is in the form of essentially unrecoverable debt. It expects creditors to get nothing.

Creditors total over £443k. All, seemingly, will go home empty handed.

There is insufficent information in the paperwork to indicate what went wrong and why Liaquat, despite not being a company owner, remains a director and is piloting the company through liquidation. Presumably it's not the outcome he or the other directors were hoping for.

🧐

The outcome, in essence, is that the club has changed hands but the fans haven't been told who's actually bought it.

If it is the case that all Liaquat's nine failed businesses were just "set up and not used", then it raises two questions:
1. On what basis does he legitimately describe himself as an "entrepreneur"?
2. If not these companies, what is the actual source of his wealth?

🧐Evening sleuthing challenge🧐

Mr Liaquat's personal website says that Winners Worldwide is “a UK based trade and investments platform."

Can anyone find any evidence, beyond its CH record, that such a platform exists?

It seems strange to me, for example, that he has not sought to acquire , which is owned but not currently being used, or , which is available now for less than a tenner. winnersworldwide.com
winnersworldwide.co.uk

The challenge hasn't turned up, well, anything. Winners Worldwide, despite being promoted as a "UK based trade and investments platform", doesn't really seem to exist. And, more than that, the new owner himself has only the lightest of digital footprints. It's very mysterious.

There's a personal website that's as new as it is flimsy:

And this, presumably, is his twitter: @irfy_101

He's an "entrepreneur, angel investor and philanthropist" who likes to keep a low profile.irfanliaquat.com

And here is the cornerstone of the empire, the "UK based trade and investments platform that allows investors to grow their wealth on an international scale, and entrepreneurs access to business operations across multiple platforms."

winners-worldwide.com

There's a reason the main business was hard to find. The website was registered last Wednesday. Happy second week of trading!

Should also point out that, despite its misleading presentation, this extremely famous phrase - commonly atrributed to Zig Ziglar - is not an original thought of the new Blyth Spartans chair.

https://twitter.com/JustRossSmith/status/1760577966260494710

Yesterday, when questions were raised about the number of failed companies Mr Irfan has been involved with, he was reported as having claimed the companies simply never traded. This appears to directly contradict the claims on his personal website.

If the companies were "set up but not used" as the chair is reported to have said, it seems odd that he opens a Twitter, Insta and Youtube for them and made a sizzle video.

@Franketh ...to be wealthy enough to buy a football club. The problem comes, however, when you describe yourself as an entrepreneur - which so many people want to do - but in reality own just a few off the shelf limited companies which aren't making any money.

Stranger still that he set up a website (), available through the wayback machine, which claimed the non-operational business had done £12.4m of transactions in a year. It was dissolved in late 2023, having never filed accounts at Companies House. smartone.global

Further, it seems strange that while SmartOne claimed to have done £12.4m of business in 2020, the firm was not founded until February 2021.

Does anyone recognise the two gentlemen pictured with Liaquat (centre) at the unveiling yesterday?