Ken Bates was last night handed control of Leeds United by administrators for the second time but just how much he paid for the club will not be made public for several months.
After the administrator, KPMG, approved Bates's initial bid of 1p in the pound for the £35m in debts that had led to the club being placed in receivership - a settlement rejected by the Revenue commissioners - there was concern among creditors and other bidders about what the sale had generated this time around.
One source close to the property developer Simon Morris and the Redbus Group claimed that their joint bid had been worth an unconditional £3.5m, or 10p in the pound, to creditors. Upon the granting of Football League approval of the bid that sum would have risen to £11.5m with £20m available for transfers and a further £5m being paid to creditors upon promotion to the Premiership.
How Bates managed to top this will not be known until the creditors' report is published, which will probably not be before the autumn. A spokesman for KPMG said that was "because it is confidential" and that "it had been agreed before" that bids for Leeds would be undisclosed.
And this after the man handling the administration for KPMG, Richard Fleming, had been challenged by the local Leeds MP Colin Burgon to hold his processes up to public scrutiny.
Burgon's challenge received the following response from Fleming in a letter written on Tuesday: "I consider that our actions are both correct and fully justified. The process has resulted in competitive tension that has driven up the return to creditors whilst minimising the risk of the club ceasing to exist, as a result of no funds being available to fund trading."
Whether Bates's takeover will become definitive rests with the former Leeds director Adam Pearson, a late bidder, and HM Revenue & Customs, which was owed £7.7m at the time Bates filed for administration. Yet another challenge to the administration process cannot be ruled out, since both were considering their positions last night.