News seemed to break earlier of a takeover of Birmingham City by an Indian consortium. The news, purporting to come from Indian newspaper The Indian Express said that brothers Shashi and Ravi Ruia were going to buy out Birmingham City and keep on Peter Pannu in a role of MD.

I’m not even going to link the story because the truth is it’s complete hogswash. However the nature of why it is hogswash needs to be highlighted and questions need to be asked as to why it was done.

While the story makes out that it comes from the Indian Express it does not. A rudimentary search of www.indianexpress.com shows the story isn’t listed on there – and this is where the unravelling begins. The URL for the fake story begins www.indianexpresssport.com – a completely different domain to the one of the website despite looking exactly the same.

A search using various online tools show that www.indianexpresssport.com is a wordpress site hosted on a server based in Studley, Oxfordshire. A further search indicates that there are at least two other websites on the server – www.electricculture.co.uk and www.nationalcateringwarehouse.com. Despite having domain names that would indicate that they should be ordinary businesses at the time I checked both also were clones of the Indian Express site.

So why the hoax?

This for me is the crux of the question. I’m especially curious as the story seemed to make pains to say that the Ruia brothers were impressed by Peter Pannu and wanted to keep him on. Has Mr Pannu got some mysterious fan trying to promote him as the saviour of the club? It’s especially more interesting bearing in mind the rumours about Pannu quitting the club which emanated from Bryan Swanson a couple of weeks ago – which like this story drew blank looks when I asked my contacts at the club what was going on. Indeed; I received an email almost as soon as I saw this story to tell me it was untrue.

It’s not helpful at this moment in time with so much uncertainty surrounding the club about a takeover to have someone make this sort of information up – especially when it seems believable as I think this did to some. Hopefully whoever it was who thought this was a good idea will give it a rest.

Edit 10:15 16 Sep GMT

I’ve had to edit this story for legal reasons. I’ve also disabled further comments on this story. As of now the offending article and the other websites mentioned in this article have been taken down. No comment as to why that has happened has yet been made.

Tags: Hoaxes, Peter Pannu, The Takeover