Given that GFH made a complete pigs ear of running the club during their period in charge of Leeds United it might surprise many people that they managed to make a profit by doing so, but that is what seems to have happened.

The annual report for Gulf Finance House reports a net gain of $6.46m (£3.8m) from the investment bank's time as majority owner. In other words, the amount they received from Massimo Cellino for a 75 per cent stake was that much greater than the total of they paid Ken Bates to buy it midway through last season, plus the amounts they had to spend just to keep us going.

They have retained a 10 per cent stake in the club to take advantage of ‘future revenues’, i.e. hoping that we get back to the Premiership some time soon and claim our share of the massive TV contracts the Premier League can command.

The fact they were able to make this profit is entirely down to the generosity of Massimo Cellino and his determination to get hold of the club. GFH provisionally agreed a figure of £25 million with Andrew Flowers consortium for a 75 percent stake, but once Flowers had had a good look through the books he reduced his offer, suggesting the club wasn’t worth £25 million once he took account of all the debts he would have to take on.

Yet Cellino agreed to pay the original £25 million price, which was generous for a club on the verge of going into administration. In January GFH were desperate for a new buyer to bail them out of trouble, and If the Italian hadn’t come along they would have had to have taken whatever reduced offer Flowers and Farnan were prepared to make.

It’s galling to see GFH make a profit when they made such a mess of running the club Certainly they inherited a mess to start with, with the season ticket money for 2013/14 already pledged to Ticketus to pay for Bates’ expensive work on the East Stand. But GFH then allowed the wage bill to run out of control, as the size of the squad increased and some generous contracts were agreed with the new arrivals.

Cellino has claimed that bot Luke Murphy and Noel Hunt secured deals worth more than £20,000 a week, which is ridiculous by Championship standards. The total wage bill went up to £18 million a year, suggesting that one or two agents were able to take advantage pf GFH’s naivety and inexperience in the world of English football. No wonder that GFH were unable to pay these inflated wages by the time we got into March.

I could just about have accepted GFH getting back the amount that they paid in, but they’ve done little to deserve a profit, apart from doing us a favour by getting rid of Ken Bates. We can only hope that if Cellino is able to walk away with a profit by the time he comes to sell up, it’s because the situation of the club has genuinely improved and we are back in the Premier League.

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