Sir Bradley Wiggins’ unpaid debts have increased to almost £2 million, more than doubling from the amount it was thought he previously owed, with the five-time Olympic champion and 2012 Tour de France winner’s financial woes expected to continue for the next two years, according to a recent bankruptcy report filed by joint liquidators.
Last November, it was reported that the Wiggins was facing bankruptcy over unpaid debts totalling to £979,953, owing to loans made by him as the director of his company Wiggins Rights Limited.
However, this new information, revealed in a filing made at Companies House earlier this month after additional claims made by creditors, would indicate that his initial debts were severely underestimated.
The news comes as another blow to the beleaguered British cyclist who retired in 2016 after a glittering professional career with Team Sky which reached its zenith in 2012, as Wiggins became the first Briton to pull on the race winner’s yellow jersey on the Champs-Elysees podium and then won a gold medal at the London Olympics.
In June, he was officially declared bankrupt, with trustees expected to seize and dispose of Sir Bradley’s assets — including his medals and trophies.
> Sir Bradley Wiggins’ medals and trophies set to be seized after being declared bankrupt
Now, according to the progress report filed by the joint liquidators, the previous Individual Voluntary Agreement made by Wiggins on behalf of his company for a claim of £979,953 has been terminated following the granting of the bankruptcy petition, and instead a “revised uplifted” claim of £1,976,157 — more than double the initial amount — has been filed under the proceedings.
The liquidator also noted: “The Liquidation will remain open until the Intellectual Property Rights have been sold and the Director’s Bankruptcy proceedings have been finalised
“I estimate that this will take approximately twenty-four months and once resolved the Liquidation will be finalised and our files will be closed.”
Following his bankruptcy declaration, Wiggins’ lawyer spoke of the miseries experienced by the former BBC Sports Personality of the Year, which had left him homeless and without a penny.
“In reality, Brad is sofa-surfing. He stays with friends and family. I don’t know where he stayed last night, I don’t know where he will stay tonight or tomorrow night. He doesn’t have an address… It is a total mess,” said barrister Alan Sellers, head of sports law at Liverpool solicitors Bond Turner.
“He has lost absolutely everything. His family home, his home in Majorca, his savings and investments. He doesn’t have a penny. It’s a very sad state of affairs.”
Sellers added that the former Hour Record holder rider, who was also an integral part of the Team Sky squad that would begin the domination of world cycling for years to come, was left “embarrassed”. He said: “I’ve said to Bradley that ‘what you’ve achieved can never be taken away from you. Life will be better when you’re debt free. And you’ve still got the support of the public’.”
According to the initial reports, Wiggins, who was reportedly worth £13 million as recently as 2017, had a long list of varied creditors, ranging from HM Revenue and Customs to a 25-year-old former rider with Team Wiggins, the cycling outfit he set up to nurture young talent, who is claiming an unpaid sum of £583.
Wiggins joins a long list of sports personalities, including tennis star Boris Becker and boxer Joe Louis, who have reportedly been let down on the financial side by their advisers and consultants, with Sellers saying that he has been hard done by their errors.
He said: “There seems to be this army of so-called advisers who quite frankly rip these people off. And they are so busy being sportsmen that when it comes to their financial affairs, they just get shafted. That’s what happened to Brad.”
Wiggins had previously claimed the financial difficulties are “a very historical matter that involves professional negligence from [others] that has left a s*** pile with my name at the front of it to deal with.
“[This] happens to a lot of sportsmen while they’re doing the grafting and on that there’ll be a number of legal claims from my lawyers left, right and centre as a result.”
In August, Wiggins finally broke his silence on his financial ordeals in a candid interview with Lance Armstrong, telling him that he was taken advantage of and was unaware of the severity of his issues until he had retired.
“One of the things I regret is I never paid attention to my financial affairs when I was racing,” he said. “You asked before if I’d got any money for riding the Giro [in 2013, after winning the Tour the previous year], and I didn’t. Because I always assumed money would be there forever, that I’d always have a value that people would pay for.
“I never did the sport for the money, but I realise I should have paid more attention to it. Because you get to the point where I am in this situation now, because of the mess that’s been created, and because it’s been rumbling on for quite a few years now – this hasn’t just happened overnight. It’s now in the hands of receivers, who can go through everything.
“Because I was getting ripped off left, right, and centre by the people looking after me, accountants as well. Which is one of the things that happens to athletes you know, you make a lot of money and if you haven’t got your eyes on it, people take advantage.
“And this will all come out in the wash over the next few years, it’s just going to be a hell of a headache to get right.”
16 thoughts on “Sir Bradley Wiggins’ unpaid debts double to almost £2 million, as five-time Olympic champion’s bankruptcy woes continue”
“I never paid attention to my
“I never paid attention to my financial affairs…”. It may sound harsh as I’m sure he was royally taken advantage of but most people don’t have the luxury of being able to pay scant regard to their finances.
Top sports people have to
Top sports people have to focus on their sport, or they won’t be the top of their sport. That they focus intensively on their sport does not give others the right to rip them off.
I am surprised there is never any accountability for all these advisors and (esp.) accountants. There should be really, somehow. If not possible for the likes of Wiggins, etc., something to bring in for the future.
I agree, spending most of the
I agree, spending most of the year flying around the continent and further afield whilst participating in one of the world’s most exhausting and high intensity sports doesn’t leave much time for poring over the minutiae of tax returns. What one can’t help thinking is that a lot of these top sports people shouldn’t actually bother with all these advisors and accountants; one of the few non-property millionaires of my acquaintance simply has all his incomings paid into a pretty standard bank account (albeit at Coutts, I believe) and pays his necessary outgoings from there as well. He reckons he’s probably missing out on the opportunity to increase his wealth by about 10% per year but is happy because there is zero chance of him losing it. It nearly always seems to be the case when sports people get into financial difficulty that they were persuaded to put money into various get rich quick or tax avoidance schemes which then came a cropper. If Wiggins had just stuck to putting his £17 million or whatever it was into a reputable deposit account, he’d probably have most of it still there today.
Rendel Harris wrote:
Well, that or gambling. Though arguably that’s a fine distinction.
It happens in music a fair
It happens in music a fair bit too and has done for years. But clearly some have the nous for it – I remember hearing Robbie Fowler and Steve Mcmanam having massive residential property holdings and then you’ve got Gary Neville doing the same thing on the commercial property side.
Arguably sticking it in a
Arguably sticking it in a bank account is bad.
But I have had family try to get me involved in some property investments… End up pointing out the return in the area isn’t actually that good and has massive risks; I get nearly as much investing in a s&p500 tracker – sure in theory shares can lose money; But IIRC there is no 10 year period where the s&p500 has EVER lost money – yes, seriously, at the lowest point in the last financial crisis (which it recovered most of within about 6 hours) it was STILL up compared to 10 years earlier. And with the ability to wait a few weeks to pull money out, s&p500 trackers beat inflation relatively reliably; Effectively computerised tracker funds match the market average with tiny fees, which matches the economy; Sure, a skilled investor can beat it; But as a busy amateur without the time to spend, the best thing I can do is shove the money in a tracker and not look at it for 10 years…
no one to blame but him
no one to blame but him Always look at your money It your money that you work for.
Mybike wrote:
Well, I don’t have any insight into how all consuming being a professional cyclist is and so how much you have to put your faith in your advisors, nor do I know whether anyone whom he trusted has ripped Bradley off or even stolen from him, so I’m afraid I can’t judge him as you seem to be able to do.
It’s not just sportsmen and
It’s not just sportsmen and women who get ripped off by their accounts and advisors. Kevin Bacon lost his money to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Elton John certainly thought that he had been robbed by his management team (the courts did not agree).
Any dealings with financiers come with an information disadvantage, they know the numbers and you don’t.
As a thought experiment consider the fees you pay on a defined contribution pension, do you know how much you are paying and what proportion of the projected return the fees take up?
Sorry, but I have little
Sorry, but I have little sympathy for Wiggins. Per the latest set of accounts (2018), by far the biggest asset was a director’s loan to Wiggins. In other words, he took over £700k out of the company which has since collapsed in a mountain of debt. Railing against his advisers seems like blame-shifting to me.
Well, according to an
Well, according to an interview he gave in August, “The top company took the biggest hits when it ran up a debt of nearly one and a half million, which got given to me as a director’s loan. But I wasn’t the director at the time and I had to be made a director to take the loan without my knowledge. I was still riding my bike at the time. So it’s a complete mess and I wasn’t aware of this mess until I was deep into retirement.”
Whether you believe him or not is a different matter of course but…
I don’t believe him. Wiggins
I don’t believe him. Wiggins Rights Ltd is the top company (it owns 101 Ride Ltd, which owns New Team Ride Ltd). It’s owned 98% by Brad, 1% by his wife and 1% by his mum.
Perhaps he was made a director without his consent, but the other directors were his wife and mother and one of them would have had to sign the forms to make him a director. And anyway, he’s not disputing that he took the loan, so why is it relevant that he was made a director?
His version is that the loan
His version is that the loan wasn’t to him, in a personal capacity, but was really a way of shuttling money from one of the companies to another, to cover deficits that it shouldn’t have had and he wasn’t aware of.
Rather than lending money
Rather than lending money directly from one company to another? Given that loaning the money to Brad to loan into another company would result in a tax charge of 32.5% of the outstanding loan, this is highly unlikely.
Depends. If they weren’t much
Depends. If they weren’t much interested in protecting his financial affairs in the first place, they probably wouldn’t be particularly concerned about adding extra tax liability to the pile either.
So his advisers were trying
So his advisers were trying to move funds around to cover losses, but in a way that needlessly created additional liabilities? It would have been such a convoluted way of doing things, and more importantly it’s not what that accounts of the other companies show.