Shepherd plans Toon takeover

Under-fire Newcastle United chairman Freddy Shepherd wants to end the 15-year reign of the Hall family with a buy-out of the £90 million club.

Shepherd has faced bitter calls for his resignation from Toon fans angry at the club's slump to the foot of the Premiership.

But, far from relinquishing power, Shepherd wants to take over the majority shareholding of Sir John Hall and his son, Douglas, and assume sole control of the club.

With the club likely to be valued at £90m, he would have to pay around £37m for Sir John's 29 per cent share-holding and his son's 12 per cent.

Shepherd already owns 28 per cent and if he does cut a deal with the Halls he will have to make an identical offer to all remaining shareholders, as it would take him over the 30 per cent threshold set by Stock Exchange rules.

He then intends to remove Newcastle from their Stock Exchange listing, following the examples of Malcolm Glazer at Manchester United, Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, and Randy Lerner at Aston Villa.

But Shepherd is likely to face competition.

The mysterious Jersey-based company, The Belgravia Group, have been in talks with the club.

Any buy-out would end the 15-year association with the club by Sir John Hall, who finally gained control of Newcastle after a bitter boardroom battle. Sir John set about revitalising the ailing club, bringing in Kevin Keegan as manager. Keegan achieved promotion to the Premiership and famously almost won the title in 1996, before being overhauled by Manchester United.

But the news that Shepherd wants to stay at St James' Park for the long haul will dismay those angry Newcastle fans who demonstrated against him following last weekend's home defeat against Sheffield United.

Shepherd, however, has often had to leave the big decisions to the Halls and, while they have been spending more time overseas, he has been left in a firefighting role.

Now he has decided that if he is going to take the flak for poor results and bad transfer buys, he should be in control.