West Ham accepts £85m bid from Icelandic group

West Ham United, the English football team, yesterday accepted an £85 million (€125.6 million) bid from WH Holding, a consortium of Icelandic businessmen.

Eggert Magnusson, president of the Icelandic Football Association, who will replace Terence Brown as club chairman, gave his wholehearted backing to manager Alan Pardew and promised to invest in new players for the struggling east London club.

The main funding for the club is coming from multi-millionaire Björgólfur Gudmundsson, chairman of Landsbanki, the Icelandic bank, who has made his wealth from finance, international shipping, transport and seafood processing. Landsbanki is the parent of Merrion Capital, the Dublin-based stockbroker.

The West Ham board had been in talks for several weeks with Kia Joorabchian, an Iranian-born entrepreneur who in July secured the loan of two top Argentinian players to the club in controversial circumstances and who had secured funding from an Israeli property magnate.

The club had rejected initial requests from Mr Magnusson to be allowed to carry out due diligence. It turned to the Icelandic consortium when no deal from Mr Joorabchian materialised, however, and eventually accepted its 421p-per-share offer.

"We can now end the uncertainty of recent weeks and move forward into the next phase of development of this great club, with Alan Pardew leading our efforts on the pitch," Mr Magnusson said in a statement.

West Ham joins Manchester United, Chelsea, Portsmouth and Aston Villa as top English clubs attracting buyers from abroad, with the prospect of more to come.

Mr Magnusson also raised the prospect of the club vacating its 35,000-seater Upton Park ground and taking up ownership of London's Olympic stadium after the 2012 Games.

Mr Gudmundsson, formerly a senior executive at Hafskip, Iceland's second-largest shipping line, was arrested and charge with bookkeeping offences in the mid-1980s and given a 12-month probationary sentence.

His chairmanship of Landsbanki, one of Iceland's biggest banks, points to the rehabilitation of his career and acceptance by the Icelandic business community.