Guus Franke, the potential new owner of Vitesse, has a past full of dubious affairs. This is evident from extensive research by research platform Follow The Money and Broadcasting GelderlandFor example, he once falsified bank statements for his girlfriend's mortgage and a multi-million dollar loan was not repaid.

Franke threw himself forward a few weeks ago as a possible new owner of Vitesse. The Arnhem club was given extra time last week to secure the professional license for the 2024/25 season. Vitesse is given a new opportunity to give an 'unconditional guarantee' that the football season can be played out next year.

The KNVB has given Vitesse an extension until July 22 to come up with that guarantee and at the same time indicated that the licensing committee still needs months to investigate Franke, his companies and his assets, after which he can possibly be approved as a shareholder.

Mortgage

The potential new owner of Vitesse is furious and has set the KNVB the deadline to approve the transfer of shares by July 19. If the football association does not do this, it will pull the plug on the takeover of Vitesse. It would mean a death sentence for the club.

Follow the Money dived together with Broadcasting Gelderland in Franke's past and came across bankruptcies, unpaid loans, unpaid bills and falsified bank statements. In May 2014, Franke's girlfriend wants to buy a house in Vleuten for over 400,000 euros. For the mortgage, she has to provide mortgage provider Obvion with an employer's statement, salary slips and bank statements.

Franke, who is not only her boyfriend but also her boss, then makes a mistake. “He provides some of the requested documents. The bank statements allegedly show that she earns 6,200 euros gross per month. Remarkable, because data from ABN AMRO, which Obvion uses to check the documents, shows that she receives a gross salary of 4,000 euros per month,” write Follow The Money and Broadcasting Gelderland.

Declaration

In October 2014, Obvion, as a mortgage provider, filed a complaint of forgery and attempted fraud against Franke and his girlfriend. However, it never seems to have led to a lawsuit. Franke was therefore not convicted for this.

It does have consequences for his girlfriend. She is blacklisted by Obvion for mortgage lenders, after which she goes to court. The Court of Appeal in 's-Hertogenbosch ultimately rules on appeal that Franke has falsified the documents provided.

Franke now accuses the forgery of those documents Follow The Money and Broadcasting Gelderland as 'stupid as hell'. “But I didn't act in bad faith.” Franke said he wanted to use the modified documents to expose his accountant, because payments would not always go well. But he had 'accidentally' sent those documents to the mortgage advisor by email. “Unbelievable”, the judge ruled on that argument, partly because Franke had also physically put the documents in the mortgage advisor's mailbox.

Former business partners describe Franke as a man of smooth talk but not so smooth payment morals. He is now a director of Axiom Partners, known for investments in sports and recent deals with the Aston Martin F1 team.

In 2022, his girlfriend is still unable to get a mortgage because she is still on the blacklist for mortgage providers. Franke comes to her aid when she wants to have a million-dollar villa built in Vleuten by providing a loan of 2.5 million with his company Axiom Partners. “This is a business transaction that relates to the financing of a real estate project,” Franke explains the remarkable loan. “Given our interest in this, we started Elsois Real Estate. This fits in with our investment policy and, like all our investments, has been discussed with the right people within our company.”

Axiom's website lists all its investments. “The mortgage to Franke's girlfriend, nor Elsois Real Estate, is listed there. According to the Land Registry, Elsois owns no real estate and no piece of land to build a villa on,” says FTM and Broadcasting Gelderland.

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