The Reuben brothers have bought into English football club Newcastle United as part of its takeover by a Saudi Arabian state investment fund.
The £300m ($408m) deal for the struggling Premier League team saw the billionaire UK shipowners' RB Sports & Media take a 10% stake.
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has 80% and PCP Capital Partners owns the other 10%.
The takeover had been halted in 2020 amid protests over Saudi Arabia's record on human rights.
But the Premier League has been assured that the Saudi state will not be involved in the day-to-day running of the club.
The publicity-shy, UK-based brothers Simon and David Reuben run Reuben Brothers, which controls bulkers and a huge property empire.
Hugely wealthy
The pair were worth £16bn in 2020, according to the Sunday Times, making them the second richest family in the country.
David's son Jamie Reuben will be a director at Newcastle, which has overnight become the richest club in the world.
In January 2020, Reuben Brothers confirmed the acquisition of part of the fleet of bankrupt Italian shipowner Rizzo Bottiglieri De Carlini Armatori (RBD Armatori).
The company acquired seven bulkers and a tanker in the deal.
Reuben Brothers formed a new company, RB|RD Armatori, with the participation of the Rizzo and De Carlini families, for the deal.
A Reuben Brothers spokesman told TradeWinds at the time that the ownership split is 75% for Reuben Brothers and 25% for the Italian families.
The Reuben Brothers group includes shipowning arm RB Shipping and the management joint venture with UK owner British Marine, RB British Marine.
At that time, Reuben Brothers already owned seven 81,000-dwt modern bulkers. The company has said it was planning to control a 50-ship fleet.
Shipping and the beautiful game
The Newcastle deal is another example of the love affair between shipowners and sport, and football in particular.
Greek shipowner Evangelos Marinakis spent £50m to control English football club Nottingham Forest, which enjoyed great success in the late 1970s but has since dropped out of the country’s top division.
Marinakis has been the owner of Piraeus team Olympiacos since 2010, which put him in direct rivalry with the Alafouzos clan through their control of Panathinaikos.
Away from Greece, US cruise supremo Micky Arison owns basketball team Miami Heat, while Freight Investor Services boss John Banaszkiewicz’s involvement with England’s Burnley FC as a director is well known. And the late Sammy Ofer has a football stadium named after him in Haifa, Israel.
Fredriksen a fan
John Fredriksen wiped out the debt of Norwegian football club Valerenga in 2003, but his former right-hand man Tor Olav Troim now controls the team.
Spanish shipowner Vicente Boluda ascended to the giddy heights of president of Real Madrid in 2009. And Glauco Lolli-Ghetti, Scorpio boss Emanuele Lauro's grandfather, was president at Italy's Sampdoria.
In 2016, Courage Marine owner Paul Suen Cho Hung bought Birmingham City, another lower-league English football team.
Norwegian tycoon Kjell Inge Rokke, who is selling leasing shipowner Ocean Yield, bought into England's Wimbledon Football Club in the late 1990s, becoming a joint owner in 2000.
