Did Mike Ashley Really Not Do Due Dilligence On Newcastle?

Why were we told that Mike Ashley didn't do due diligence when he was looking at buying Newcastle United? Why would a business man renowned for investing in failing brands and offering crisis loan (or gambling massively on potential share failures, as he did with Tesco recently) be concerned with bailing out the club with a personal loan that was repayable by strict terms, and was protected by the club's assets and its incoming TV payments? Forgive the cynicism, but that doesn't add up. Looking at how Ashley is now dealing with Rangers - sending Derek Llambias in as a consultant, and looking to profit precisely because the club's finances are in such a mess - and indeed at his wider business history, the idea that he would not look at the club's finances is perverse to say the least. We're told that Ashley saved the club, that he had to pump his own money in when Freddy Shepherd - cast forever as the villain - hid the truth as if they did their deal in the back room of a pub and John Hall skipped off into a puff of smoke laughing like a ghoul at the great deception. No, Ashley is a crisis businessman, attracted to precisely the things that we accept as the things he apparently missed in his negotiations with John Hall. We were sold - by the man himself - the image of an investor who bought the club because he loved football, but then Sir John revealed that over the course of three days of negotiations (not the whirlwind dealings we were all led to believe in), Ashley's representatives outlined more financially led reasons:

€œI was told that the man behind the deal was Mike Ashley and I sat with his representatives over 3 days thrashing out a deal. I was keen to know why they wanted the club and they were quite honest. They wanted to market their sports goods in the Far East and would use the club to help do this.€

Hall also confirmed that Ashley's party were the preferential buyers, over a Malaysian consortium, because they waived the right to due diligence, which would have held up the deal for six weeks (and apparently added a golden handshake for the privilege of not doing due diligence). The results of that diligence would only have revealed a stadium mortgage, and there has to be a reason Ashley's representatives offered a better deal as well as waiving due diligence - it wasn't just to beat the other consortium, it was more likely because it wasn't really necessary. Would Ashley's team of financial cohorts - who identify potential investments and brands to buy just as his scouting team look for contract clauses and "falsely affordable" players like Yohan Cabaye and Demba Ba - really miss something as incomplex as a mortgage? Perhaps they didn't do due diligence because they didn't need to, and it could be worked in to the narrative of Ashley as personal saviour rather than the motivated, operating administrator that he actually is in his wider business career. In light of the Rangers situation, it all looks a bit fishy, and while cynics will no doubt say it's mere speculation, it does seem odd that a man who doesn't fail in business deals - who has an almighty investment team working with him, and who actively seeks crises he can "fix" to profit - would make such a fundamental error. We needed to believe any buyer would be more interested in football, rather than business, and that story seems to have fed rather wonderfully at first into the idea of a slightly foolish messiah: we wanted to be deceived that football is not business, and it seems that's exactly what might have happened.