ACCOUNTS JUST filed for Sunderland football club indicate that chairman and former Irish international striker Niall Quinn (right) took a pay cut last year.
The club’s highest paid director, who is not named but is believed to be Quinn, was paid £888,142 in the year to the end of June 2009. This was down on the £939,317 he was paid in 2008. Quinn is the best-paid chairman in British football.
Sunderland Ltd made a loss of £26.5 million in the year, more than five times the level of the previous 12-month period. Its wage bill rocketed by £11 million.
This was the year when the Irish Drumaville consortium – which included publicans Charlie Chawke and Louis Fitzgerald – sold the club to wealthy American investor Ellis Short.
With losses like that, who can blame them. As debt-laden Portsmouth and Hull City have discovered, the Premier League is far from the Promised Land.
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Bitbuzz, the Irish Wi-Fi provider, has dipped its toes into the London market. The company has appointed a regional salesman, Thomas Kamm, in the city, with the focus on providing Wi-Fi to three- and four-star hotels.
“We see this as quite a good opportunity for us, even though it’s a more mature market than here,” Bitbuzz chief Shane Deasy told me.
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4FM, the quasi-national commercial radio station in which The Irish Times is an investor, has agreed a deal with UPC Ireland for carriage on its digital TV services.
This will give it access to 300,000 households and place it with RTÉ’s radio stations, Newstalk and Today FM.
