Dangote To Buy Another Club If Kroenke Doesn’t Sell Arsenal

The richest man in Africa, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, might end up buying another club if the major shareholder Stan Kroenke refuses to sell Premier League football team Arsenal.

Its no longer news to say that Dangote has interest in taking over the ownership of the London based football club, of which he’s a fan, but only after he’s completed one of the world’s biggest oil refineries in Lagos, Nigeria. Also on his to-do list: The investment of billions of dollars in sugar, rice and dairy production in the West African nation and the sale of shares of his cement company in London.

“By the time we’ve finished, we’ll be a $30 billion company in terms of revenue,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV at the New Economy Forum in Singapore. “We’ll have an excess amount of cash to start playing around with.”

Kroenke owns almost all of Arsenal after buying Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s 30 percent stake in August in a deal that valued the club at about 1.8 billion pounds ($2.4 billion). It was funded with a 557 million-pound, two-year loan from Deutsche Bank AG. The 71-year-old American is worth $8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and also controls the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams.

“I’m very attached to Arsenal but if he won’t sell, I might have to change,” said Dangote, 61 years old and worth $11.1 billion. “I’m very much a fan of football. I have to have a club. I don’t have to own Arsenal.”