READING are in exclusive talks about selling the club to a mysterious property tycoon.
SunSport has learned that Paul Taylor – a bricklayer turned banker and financier from South London – has been in secret negotiations to buy Reading for several months.
Taylor once tried to buy Chelsea and came close to pulling off a £10.5billion takeover of supermarket Sainsbury’s for the Qatar royal family.
Initial Reading talks involved asset management firm Blue Horizon, but Taylor has now secured funding from elsewhere.
The Reading sale has been shrouded in mystery since Chinese owner Dai Yongge scrapped a £30million deal with former Wycombe owner Rob Couhig in September.
The club announced they had entered “exclusive negotiations” with another buyer the following month.
This week Reading claimed “negotiations with the prospective buyer remain ongoing,” whilst insisting “confidentiality must remain in place”.
SunSport has been told by multiple sources that Taylor is the mystery buyer.
His wife is understood to be a Reading fan, while the land owned by the club makes it an attractive investment.
As well as a hotel at the Select Car Leasing Stadium, 120 acres of land at the club’s Bearwood Park training ground also offers development potential.
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The secretive Taylor has enjoyed periods of spectacular success during a colourful property investment career.
After starting out as a bank cashier, he ran NatWest’s structured-finance business before joining Robbie and Vincent Tchenguiz at their Rotch property group in 2000.
There he led talks on behalf of the brothers with Ken Bates about buying Chelsea – before the sale to Roman Abramovich.
At one stage Rotch’s empire reportedly owned one per cent of all residential property in Britain, before it collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis.
By that point he had launched a joint investment venture with the Qatari government called Three Delta, worth several billion pounds at its peak.
In 2007, Taylor led a £10.5bn takeover bid for Sainsbury on behalf of the Qatar Investment Authority, but the collapse of that deal saw him dismissed by the Qatari government.
QIA bought Taylor’s 50 per cent Delta fund stake the following year as he retreated from public view.
But he made headlines five years later by buying a trading jacket purportedly worn by Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings Bank, at an auction.
Taylor’s plans for Reading remain unclear.
But Reading’s large real estate portfolio make it an attractive deal, particularly as the issue of Yongge’s debts to a Chinese bank seem to be resolved.
Chinese bank Haitong effectively blocked the sale to Couhig by obtaining a stop notice in the British Virgin Islands, where their stadium is registered.
Taylor and Reading did not comment.
