Curious about Liverpool FC situation
AFAIK gillet and hicks received massive loans to fund their purchase and they have not been keeping up the repayments so now the creditors own the club. Its like getting a car on the never never, or a mortgage, i fyou don't keep up repayments the credit company take back the car or the bank repossess your house. I am sure it is a bit more complicated than that in this case, but tbh I would be surprised if it was fundamentally different.  thats why RBS and the mill fininance are involved, they provided the loans, and are probably desperately keen to sell before going into administation, which would dock liverpool 9 points and reduce the value even more.
"First off, leaving money in a 529 account is not that bad, since you may always change the beneficiary to most any blood relative.  So if you have leftovers, you don't HAVE to pay the 10% penalty if you have a grandchild, for instance, that can use it.  But if you would rather have the money out, then you need a strategy to get it out that is tax efficient. My prescription for managing a situation like this is not to pay directly out of the 529 account, but instead calculate your cost of education up-front and withdraw that money at the beginning of the school year.  You can keep it in a separate account, but that's not necessary.  The amount you withdraw should be equal to what the education costs, which may be estimated by taking the budget that the school publishes minus grants and scholarships.  You should have all of those numbers before the first day of school.  This is amount $X. During the year, write all the checks out of your regular account.  At the end of the school year, you should expect to have no money left in the account.  I presume that the budget is exactly what you will spend.  If not, you might need to make a few adjustments, but this answer will presume you spend exactly $X during the fall and the spring of the next year. In order to get more out of the 529 without paying penalties, you are allowed to remove money without penalty, but having the gains taxed ($y + $z).  You have the choice of having the 529 funds directed to the educational institution, the student, or yourself.  If you direct the funds to the student, the gains portion would be taxed at the student's rate.  Everyone's tax situation is different, and of course there is a linkage between the parent's taxes and student's taxes, but it may be efficient to have the 529 funds directed to the student.  For instance, if the student doesn't have much income, they might not even be required to file income tax.  If that's the case, they may be able to remove an amount, $y, from the 529 account and still not need to file.  For instance, let's say the student has no unearned income, and the gains in the 529 account were 50%.  The student could get a check for $2,000, $1,000 would be gains, but that low amount may mean the student was not required to file. Or if it's more important to get more money out of the account, the student could remove the total amount of the grants plus scholarships ($y + $z).  No penalty would be due, just the taxes on the gains.  And at the student's tax rate (generally, but check your own situation). Finally, if you really want the money out of the account, you could remove a check ($y + $z + $p).  You'd pay tax on the gains of the sum, but penalty of 10% only on the $p portion. This answer does not include the math that goes along with securing some tax credits, so if those credits still are around as you're working through this, consider this article (which requires site sign-up).  In part, this article says: How much to withdraw -    ... For most parents, it will be 100% of the beneficiary’s qualified higher education expenses paid this year—tuition, fees, books, supplies, equipment, and room and board—less $4,000. The $4,000 is redirected to the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC),... When to withdraw it -    Take withdrawals in the same calendar year that the qualified expenses were paid. .... Designating the distributee -    Since it is usually best that the Form 1099-Q be issued to the beneficiary, and show the beneficiary’s social security number, I prefer to use either option (2) or (3) [ (2) a check made out to the account beneficiary, or (3) a check made out to the educational institution] What about scholarships? -    The 10 percent penalty on a non-qualified distribution from a 529 plan is waived when the excess distribution can be attributed to tax-free scholarships. While there is no direct guidance from the IRS, many tax experts believe the distribution and the scholarship do not have to match up in the same calendar year when applying the penalty waiver. If you're curious about timing (taking non-penalty grants and scholarship money out), there is this link, which says you ""probably"" are allowed to accumulate grants and scholarship totals, for tax purposes, over multiple years." "From some background reading I'm doing, it sounds like the union has people by the proverbial balls anyway. Even in an ""agency shop"", where union membership is optional, non members must pay for the collective bargaining done by the union, and ""union shop"" just means that the employer can hire anybody, but they must join the union in order to be employed. All of those seem to indicate that every worker in the represented class must accept the terms of the collective bargaining. [reference](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_America_v._Beck#Background)  Part of the reason that I'm curious is that, once I've decided that I'm done being an engineer, I think it might be fun to teach, but every time I hear about union negotiations, it makes me think that operating in that system would be lame. Going from a world where merit is the primary differentiator to a world where years in the system count for more would kinda suck." I have one of the top law firms in my country looking after this, who have plenty of experience in capital raises.   I realize that all transactions are different, however, I'm just curious to see if anyone has examples of what a pitch would look like. This situation is certainly difficult to handle. While there are good reasons for and against giving or loaning money directly why not handle this in an open and honest way?  Give your friends the link to your question, which shows that you care about their well-being and the friendship. It also shows that you are deeply concerned that the situation might become worse if they are unable to get the finances in order.  If a close friend of mine would be so concerned it would definitely get me starting to think about the situation and possible ways out of it. There will be no single solution to the problems they are facing but having friends that actually care can stabilize such a tricky situation much more than any small financial gain. When a friend of mine was in deep financial trouble he did not hang out with us anymore because we often met in bars or cafés which were at that point just too expensive for him. So simply changing the location to a less expensive place allowed him to participate in social life again and was much better if we would have payed for him and created an atmosphere of social debt. Google 'Amazon workers conditions' or 'Amazon warehouse report' and have a read. Many newspapers have done undercover reports which touch upon issues like that. I could bring up the actual one but you'd be better served just reading a few.   A bit here:  https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-accused-of-intolerable-conditions-at-scottish-warehouse  Worse here:  https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/18/amazon-regime-making-british-staff-physically-and-mentally-ill-says-union  But this is the tip of be iceberg. I took a look at their cash flow and they spent 3 billion buying back shares and another 3 billion just last year in capex.  That is 6 billion right there.  I'm not sure what that capex was supposed to buy but it appears they aren't getting much of a payoff. It would be interesting to do an anonymous survey of upper management, to find out how many of them actually thought the retail stores would turn around.  It seems hard to believe they were deluding themselves, it seems more likely they each were trying to fool their own boss, or the shareholders, a little longer, so they could keep their jobs a bit longer, and pretending that their subordinates fooled them. Hi We are looking to connect with UK medical technology companies and other relevant people who could help us complete a project we are currently working on.  We are currently representatives of a consortium of Drs based in the Middle East and Iran.    With the lifting of international sanctions by the 5+1 group of nations and JCPOA in early 2016, on Iran, has resulted in our clients being very interested in purchasing and becoming official distributors off medical equipment from the UK.  I have had some lengthy discussions with this team in Dubai and Tehran, and I'm told the the domestic Persian market has a very deep sense of of affiliation with German, Italian and French companies, whom have been involved more in the Persian Gulf region than Britain since 2012.  One key point I did however notice is the demand and respect that British Tech commands.  This has encouraged our team to take on this project to help these guys access the products they require.   They are interested in buying from UK manufacturing and reselling it as official distributors to the domestic Persian markets 80million population.    They are also very interested in collaborating with and acquiring the licences to UK medical technologies, which they would like to then buy the rights too or licence/franchise for their locality and they have the capacity to invest in manufacturing this product in the Middle East, working in conjunction with the UK companies.  An example of how this has worked in the past is the French car manufacturer working in collaboration with Iranian Engineering company to produce and manufacture Peugeot Pars car.  Which looks very much like a peugeot 405 but is infact designed and developed  specifically for the local market and is also manufactured locally.  This is a huge success and we feel we can imitate its success in our plan too.  I have been in discussions with a number of sources where I could possibly complete this project through.  I have come to know from my research globally within this sector that there are approx 3500 medical technology companies registered in the UK.   All specialising in various fields.  I was wondering is there a database anywhere which I can't access to see whom and where these companies are exactly in the UK.    I have until now  established that between 70-80% of companies worldwide in MED Tech field are based in or affiliated with either the USA or Israel,  with the majority of the remaining 20% of companies being European or Japanese.  There are also many collaborations between Euro companies which was quiet pleasing for me to see.    We fully understand that the USA under Trump have reinstated the sanction for USA.  However our understanding is that we in the UK are not at present restricted by Sanctions to trade with Iranian companies.   We strongly feel that the British medical technology sector here in the UK could benefit considerably it could also help It to progress  and grow to take a bigger global Market share as well bring in 100s of millions in revenues for the UK economy.  We strongly feel that with Brexit negotiations in the pipeline, as well as the geo political situation that the world finds itself in right now, that this is the right time to work in collaboration with this consortium and help them with completion of this project successfully and lawfully.  We strongly feel though that the due diligence carried in any trade deals needs to be within a framework of EU, UK regulations and in compliance with any UN or other sanctions we are un aware off.  We had been planning to use due diligence guidelines from the USA when dealing with Iranian companies, however we feel this is the main reason why France and Germany along with Italy are winning all the contracts in Iran, and with the help of relevant government departments we would like to develop our own plan for this based on the current situation.  We would like this to be the beginning of a number of high level trade deals we are in negotiations with right now with high level Middle Eastern business consortiums, in Dubai, Doha, Muscat, Tehran, Kuwait.    We feel Britain has missed it to France and Germany when it comes to Iran, and would like to work with all the relevant departments to create a due diligence plan which is effective and helps us reach our goals.  I would appreciate any advice you can give us in this respect.  Thanks  Alfie Star Senior project manager  alfie.star@commodustrade.com  http://www.commodustrade.com