Hibs Blog

Rumours are mounting that that there are players, ex-players or officials from Rangers Football Club on the recently leaked BNP members list. The list can easily be found on Google. A prize for the person who spots the first Hun on the list.

Edit: Unable to find any rangers players and think it’s probably just a rumour. I don’t think the rumours of it being two Scottish footballers are true either. Bob Malcolm’s name is definitely not there.

Hibs announced the signing of Finnish player Jonatan Johansson on a pre-contract agreement.  He signs from Malmö FF in Sweden and will officially join Hibs on 1st of January 2009.  Presumably we’ll be selling Steven Fletcher sometime in the 4 weeks after that.  If not, we’ll surely have too many strikers.  Even playing 3-4 a week which we have been doing unsuccessfully for a while now, there would surely be too many unhappy forwards.

Jonatan Johansson is an experienced international (91 caps for Finland) and a good mate of the Gaffer, Mixu Paatelainen.  He’s also an ex-Hun but let’s not talk about that.  He comes with a decent reputation but the statistics show he hasn’t exactly scored for fun (see below) and at 33 he’s surely in the twilight of his career.

That said, perhaps a big, mature centre forward to partner Derek Riordan is just what we need?

Here’s a YouChoob compilation of Jonatan Johansson’s best bits:

There was a request for these pics on Hibees Bounce today. Happy to help out a fellow Hibby

A week later would have been the 6 year anniversary of the biggest Edinburgh derby victory since we humped them 0-7 in 1973.  The photos were taken on the morning of derby day. Some scallywags had plastered Jambo baiting slogans all over Crawford Bridge at the end of Bothwell Street awaiting the arrival of the mini-huns.

Click on a thumbnail to enlarge.

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Albert Kidd

Here are a few images I had on my hard drive from years ago, I’ll post more in the coming days and weeks. First up, Brazil legend Socrates with an Albert Kidd t-shirt.

Socrates shows his new t-shirt on Porty Beach

I might post the large images for the subbuteo pics later if anyone requests them. Feel free to hotlink to these as avatars:

Hibs and Hearts subbuteo players

Famous Five as subbuteo figures

As a wee bonus, I also found an MP3 entitled “albert kidd”. I can only presume it’s the commentary from 1986 when he denied Hearts the league but my sound card is having issues so I can’t check. I’ve added it to the MP3s page. If anyone has anything else good for the page, please comment on this page.

Albert Kidd MP3

Ukio Bankas Shares

Edit / Update

13 November 2008

Ukio Bankas shares continue to plummet like the proverbial lead balloon.

They are down another third this week as the lovely graph shows -

Ukio Bankas shares plummet

Is it bad for Hearts?  Who knows?  I doubt that it can be good.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Original Post

I haven’t done a “demise of hearts” post for a while so it’s about time.  Plenty has gone on since the last one.  There were rumours this week that Hearts were to go into administration on Wednesday 8th October.  These rumours have the same source as similar ones that have appeared every couple of months recently and there is some basis in fact.  The club were never likely to go into administration this week though.

Basically what happens is when Hearts don’t pay their bill, the company who is owed money starts legal proceedings and gets a court order to wind up the club.  The court sends notice to Hearts advising that if they don’t pay the bill by whatever date, the administrators will be sent in.  Inevitably, Hearts pay the bill at the last minute.  It happened the last few times and it’ll happen this time.

There have been other Romanov related rumblings this week, not least the fact that Ukio Bankas shares are in freefall.  Here is the graph from this week…

Ukio Bankas shares in freefall this week

And from one year ago…..

Ukio Bankas shares over last 12 months

It would appear that all is not well. What effect this will have on Heart of Midlothian is difficult to say. There have been big problems in paying staff at the club and other parts of the Romanov empire appear to have been affected too. Ukio Bankas sold 5.12% of it’s shares to Medicinos Bankas UAB on the 2nd of October, presumably to raise some ready cash. It doesn’t look such a great deal for Medicinos and certainly hasn’t steadied the share price.

Aluminium companies have suffered greatly on the stock exchange recently and we’ve yet to see the full extent of the fallout from that.  Romanov owns a big aluminium plant in Bosnia which has been the cash cow of the Ukio empire and there was a report online that it was struggling just now although I’ve lost the link for the time being.

Hearts have put out a statement to the effect that everything is okay, nothing to see here. Just a few more “technical glitches” - aye right.

I spotted a George Foulkes photo caption thread the other day, some of the replies are pretty amusing.

George Foulkes - "I'm sorry, my friend, but I have absolutely no recollection of having assaulted you."

Or, alternatively….

“Oi fatty……gonnae stay there for a minute so I’m not the stupidest looking erse in this photo”

“For the final time, I don’t have a hip flask and ye canny have a nip.”

“Champions of Europe within 5 years, Meester Foulkes - I promise.”

This little nugget was posted on HMFCkickback today:

“UBIG has invested quite a bit of cash in the Republika Srpska part of Bosnia Herzegovina in recent years.
It backed the huge Birac alumina plant at Banja Luka, which a couple of weeks ago gave up 98% of its capital to cover bad debts. Birac has also lost around 80% of its share value in the past year (from 30 to 6) and recently laid off 245 workers.
UBIG also founded the Balkan Investment Bank in Banja Luka, which manages the Balkan Investment Fund. This has poured cash into a number of major businesses in that area.
Its biggest fund placements have been in the aforementioned stricken Birac plant plus a bauxite firm, metals company and Srpska Telekoms. All have lost at least 50% of their value in the past 12 months.
The credit crunch means nobody is giving any more loans to UBIG or UKIO, which invested heavily in the property market in the Baltics and Russia - just before these markets crashed.
UBIG and UKIO have backed loser after loser. Now that the credit has dried up, they are having to account for their losses.
In recent days UKIO’s shares (which have nosedived over the past three months) have been among the highest-traded on the Baltic exchange — suggesting that the company is spending a LOT of cash trying to prop up its value. Yet the price of UKIO shares is still falling.”