Mystery bid for Northampton

Gemcorp, the London-based emerging markets asset manager, has been through many iterations and not a little controversy over the years. Is the next step the sunlit uplands of English League Two football? The firm headed by Bulgaria-born financier Atanas Bostandjiev appears to be backing an offer by a Brazilian investment group to invest in lossmaking Northampton Town Football Club, according to company filings.

Gemcorp, Northampton Town, and the Brazilian investor did not respond to requests for comment from the Financial Times.  But they seem to be linked by public filings that point to a deal beyond the usual emerging markets fodder. We’ll lay it out here.

Firstly, the Cobblers  have not had a good year. Relegated to League Two after a loss to Luton Town left them bottom of League One, they epitomise the financial challenges for teams trying to turn their fortunes around at these lower tiers of the English game. For the year to the end of June 2025, the club reported a nearly £3mn pre-tax loss on revenues of £7.5mn, and £10mn in net debt.

But Northampton Town said in April that “a well-funded, football focused investment group” had offered to invest in the club. This has proceeded to a review by the Independent Football Regulator, the newish body that has powers to block bids for English clubs. Despite a non-disclosure agreement, “we can say that good progress continues to be made” on the deal.

James Whiting, Northampton Town’s chief executive, said in a recent matchday programme for the club’s first game of the new season. (They drew against Swindon Town.) BBC Sport reported this month that the bidder is Sports Alpha Capital, a consortium involving Alexandre Pato, a former Brazilian national and AC Milan forward, which also recently made an abortive bid for Colchester United.

Without a website or much of a LinkedIn presence beyond a couple of executives, Sports Alpha Capital appears rather mysterious, so we can only speculate what investment opportunities it sees in England’s fourth-tier football league.

But a familiar name soon appears in connection with it. Soon after the end of its involvement with Colchester United this year, Sports Alpha Capital registered a Delaware company that was named after Northampton Town FC, according to filings. Invenciveis, a UK subsidiary of the Delaware company, was registered in June — at Gemcorp’s offices in leafy Mayfair. Yuri Baidoukov, a director of international businesses at Gemcorp, and Felipe Berliner, Gemcorp’s head of structuring, are the two directors of Invenciveis, according to Companies House filings.  João Vitor Xavier Marques, a Portuguese national resident in Brazil, is listed as a person with significant control over Invenciveis, according to the filings. Xavier did not respond to a request for comment from the FT.

Bostandjiev, the former London head of Russia’s VTB Capital, founded Gemcorp in 2014 with $250mn in seed money from Albert Avdolyan, a billionaire with links to Rostec, Russia’s state arms maker, and Sergei Adoniev, a business partner. Adoniev exited in 2015, and Avdolyan’s investment in Gemcorp was bought out by management in 2020. Avdolyan was subsequently sanctioned by the US in 2023 for being “a financier to Russian President Vladimir Putin” and Rostec chief Sergei Chemezov.

Over the past decade, Bostandjiev has built Gemcorp into an emerging markets asset manager with particular interests in the southern African nation of Angola, where the group has built a refinery and lent billions of dollars to the state. It has more recently also pivoted to the Gulf and private credit investing.

Gemcorp, which closed its Moscow office in 2022, has always denied that it has ever acted in support of the Russian state or Rostec or related entities.

If the firm has taken an interest in Northampton Town, this would not be Gemcorp’s first foray into football. In June, Bostandjiev appeared as the new face of Levski Sofia, a top-division club in Bulgaria, four years after the Bulgarian government ended an energy deal with Gemcorp because of political controversy over its Russian ties. Gemcorp has said the deal ended by mutual consent.

The IFR should usually rule on bids within 90 days, but it can extend this period. So it could make its views known soon. Not that bid sagas always end there. Earlier this month, Turki Alalshaikh, the Saudi government official who brought the world the Riyadh Comedy Festival, withdrew an offer for Championship side Derby County despite IFR approval, which he said had left “no time to prepare the team or club for the season ahead.” With the season now under way, Cobblers fans will want to hear soon.