Paul Kemsley
| Paul Kemsley | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 1967 (age 49) Stanmore, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Football chairman, property developer |
Paul Zeital Kemsley (born August 1967) is an English businessman. He is best known as a property developer, and to sports fans as a former Vice-Chairman of Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur, and as Chairman of the revived New York Cosmos.
He was educated at Atholl School in Rayners Lane, Harrow. At the age of 15 Kemsley worked on Saturdays at John Paul Menswear, which led him to meeting Mike Ashley, who opened his first Sports World equipment outlet across the road. They would play darts for money on quiet afternoons.
Kemsley left school in 1984, at the age of 17, and began working at Gross Fine as a junior surveyor. Then, from 1985 to 1992, Kemsley worked as an agent at the commercial real-estate firm Ross Jaye. In 1992, he decided to leave and join his old friend Ashley at Sports Direct where he helped to expand the group.
By 1995, Kemsley wanted to start his own business and he established a property and securities company with "the £1,800 he had left in his pocket." This was Rock Joint Ventures Ltd, formed with Joe Lewis of ENIC Group, a British investment company, and Spurs chairman Daniel Levy. Rock was an investor and developer of commercial and residential property, but specialised in land trading. It also had a private hedge fund that specialised in acquiring strategic stakes in public companies, the most well-known being their 28% share in Countryside Properties plc in 2004, which they sold to the chairman for a profit of £12 million.
Kemsley was a director of Spurs from 2001, and Vice-Chairman of the club at the time of his departure in 2007. He had helped the club to reach a healthy financial position. Levy announced that Kemsley was resigning to focus on his property interests.
By 2007, Rock's property portfolio was valued at £750 million. Lewis parted from the company around that time. It set up a joint venture with HBOS to build a £1bn property portfolio. However, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2010, Rock was placed into administration in June 2009, ending Kemsley's involvement. The administrator PwC began selling the major properties of the portfolio, which included the Selhurst Park stadium, in October 2009. HBOS lost hundreds of millions of pounds, and Peter Cummings, the banker who had promoted the joint investments in Kemsley's portfolio, was fined £500,000 by the FSA in 2012.
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