Today marks the end of an era in NFL history as the Rosenbloom family are on their way out of team ownership 57 years after Carroll Rosenbloom became majority owner of the Colts. Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez have an agreement to sell their majority stake in the team to business Shahid Khan, as reported by Bernie Miklasz this morning.
Khan, 55, lives in Champaign-Urbana and owns auto-parts manufacturer Flex-N-Gate Corp., which earned more than $2 billion last year. His family moved from Pakistan to St. Louis when he was a child and he has lived in Champaign-Urbana for over 40 years. He does not appear to be buying the team to move it. It looks once again like the Rams will stay in St. Louis for the long term.
Stan Kroenke has the right of first refusal and the right to sell Khan his 40% of the team but he does not appear to be a significant obstacle in the way of the sale, which is expected to take 6-8 weeks to complete and will have to be approved by the rest of the NFL owners.
It's a big day, and a celebratory one, in the history of football in St. Louis.
Link section to update throughout the day.
* Additional Khan profile info and team purchase details from Miklasz. Link Khan's tax issues (see below) should not be a significant hurdle on his way to ownership of the Rams.
* Khan may be the Steve Jobs of bumpers. In 1978, he started a company out of his garage to design and manufacture one-piece bumpers which are now the industry standard. He bought Flex-N-Gate in 1980. NMSDC article
* As you might guess from his Champaign-Urbana address, Khan graduated from the University of Illinois. He recently gifted the school a new tennis complex.
* He and his wife Ann also sponsor five professorships at the U of I's Center on Health, Aging and Disability.
* Khan is a Republican campaign donor; he backed Mitt Romney for President.
* The Khans are suing former financial advisers after losing a significant amount of money in a tax shelter plan that wasn't actually a valid tax shelter at the time they invested in it. That led to the IRS going after them for back taxes. I am poor at analyzing this sort of thing; the article is here. It involved buying and selling options on foreign currency. A district court originally ruled in Khan's favor against the IRS but that decision was overturned in federal court. Khan appears to be planning to keep fighting the IRS to get back $68 million in back taxes he paid as a result of the case. (After all, he may need that for Ndamukong Suh.)
* Shahid Khan Afridi, one of the world's best cricket players, is making it really hard for me to find info about "our" Shahid Khan.
* Khan was the cover boy of an advertising feature on minority-owned businesses that ran in Fortune magazine. Link (Warning: It's a 5-plus MB PDF) He says Flex-N-Gate has never had a year where it lost money. Detroit wouldn't give Flex-N-Gate the time of day, though, because of its small size, until a Wall Street Journal cover article in 1991 detailed FNG's successful relationship with Toyota. (No, FNG doesn't make brakes. Remember? Bumpers.) Khan has no plans to take FNG public.
OK, that's about 30 pages of Google search results; maybe I better try to do some work this morning.
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