Rossoneri Sport Investment (named after Milan’s red-black nickname) had purchased the club from Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest for €740 million. But it did so with the aid of €180m in loans from hedge fund Elliott Management Corporation, which, the Financial Times now reports, carried an annual interest rate of more than 11 per cent. The loan was structured in such a way as to allow Li to pay interest with further debt rather than cash, so it kept increasing. “And it had a collateral package with serious teeth,” the FT says.

Delano reported back in April on how Li’s proposal to use Bitcoin through a crypto payments service firm to pay back some of the loan was declined by Elliott Management. And the FT article questions Li’s reputation and the source of his financing to buy the club in the first place, suspecting that “Li’s investment in the club had been further leveraged in China.”