Liverpool Football Club – which owes two banks £350m – is close to renegotiating its debt with the Royal Bank of Scotland, the BBC has learnt.

RBS has told club owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett the debt, due to be repaid in July, will be refinanced.

BBC business editor Robert Peston says RBS will insist on significant payments in the subsequent six months.

It comes as Portsmouth’s defender Glen Johnson has agreed to join Liverpool in a £17.5m move.

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Broadcast groups will put the final touches to their bids to acquire the live media rights to 46 football matches forfeited last week by crisis-stricken Irish firm after it failed to meet a payment deadline.

With less than eight weeks to go to the start of the next season, bids must be lodged with the Premier League tomorrow. Given the time pressure, the prospects of attracting widespread interest from new entrants to football broadcasting are thought to be remote.

Industry insiders said this may leave Sky to scoop up a package of 26 Monday evening games at a bargain price, taking its total for next season to the maximum permitted level under EU rules, which is five of the six batches of games.

Sky has secured the rights to air Monday evening games for the 2010-11 season with a three-year deal that will again see it control a maximum of five packages.

Meanwhile the Disney-owned specialist sports broadcaster ESPN, which owns a UK digital channel, is the front runner to pick up the final batch of 26 Saturday teatime games for the upcoming season.

Pay-to-watch service Top Up TV has been mentioned as another potential bidder. It is backed by Russian-American industrialist Len Blavatnik, whose Access Industries walked away from rescue talks with Setanta on Friday.

A rescue deal, believed to have involved a £20m cash injection, would have seen Access Industries buy a 51% stake in the broadcaster. But it failed to go ahead, leaving Setanta unable to meet a £10m Premier League payment deadline on Friday. Access Industries said it was disappointed not “to have been able to make this deal happen”, adding it would “continue to explore opportunities in this area”.

Last night it was reported that BT Vision had stopped selling Setanta Sport to new customers while it reviews the situation.

Restructuring partners from Deloitte are understood to have been lined up to act as administrators should the forfeiture of Premier League rights prove to be a fatal blow for Setanta. The broadcaster, which also controls rights to FA Cup matches, England games and Scottish Premier League fixtures, won few friends among sports fans since it was established in 1990. Many of them were angered by the broadcasters’ subscriber rates.

The company has signed up about 1.2 million subscribers – and it needs 1.9 million to break even. It is believed to be operating at an annual loss of almost £100m. New subscriptions were suspended this month and the business has also missed a £3m payment to the Scottish Premier League. Setanta shareholders include Doughty Hanson, Balderton Capital and ­Goldman Sachs.

Source: Guardian UK

George Gillett, Liverpool’s co-owner, has moved to consolidate his position at Anfield and remove some of the financial uncertainty surrounding the club after he agreed to sell his majority share in the NHL team Montreal Canadiens back to the Molson brewing family as part of a deal worth an estimated £330m.

The 60-year-old, who took control of the Canadiens in 2001, has agreed to sell his 80.1% stake in the ice hockey team, together with the Bell Centre Arena where they play and the Gillett Entertainment Group, which promotes sport and music. The deal is not expected to go through until August but today’s announcement will help Gillett provide the increased personal guarantees that Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia have been seeking in relation to the refinancing of his and Tom Hicks’s £350m loan before next month’s deadline.

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Formula 1 commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone has said there will be a British Grand Prix in 2010.

Donington Park, which has a contract to host the British race from 2010, has not yet raised the finance it needs to upgrade its track.

“There will be a British Grand Prix next year, for sure, but it all depends on Donington getting their act together,” Ecclestone told BBC Sport.

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England’s staging of the second World Twenty20 tournament has been a huge financial success – and the England and Wales Cricket Board are set to turn down the chance to organise an overseas edition of the Indian Premier League in favour of promoting their own domestic tournament.

Just under 96 per cent of the available tickets have been sold for the games at Lord’s, The Oval and Trent Bridge, which have reached record television audiences – an estimated global audience of 400 million watched India lose to England in the group stages.

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Manchester United launched a five-year partnership with Chinese electronics manufacturer Aigo on Thursday, a deal which the club described as “up there” with its biggest commercial deals.

The Chinese company will make and distribute co-branded digital cameras, multimedia players and data storage devices for the United globally, and mobile phone handsets in China. Financial details were not disclosed.

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The stricken Icelandic bank Straumur, which has a 70% stake in the new owners of West Ham United, has been granted a six-month reprieve by a district court in Reykjavik to stave off creditors as it continues its desperate attempts to restructure financially.

CB Holdings, which is made up of creditors owed money by West Ham’s former owner Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson and whose majority stakeholder is Straumur, took over at Upton Park last week. The bank has been in danger of being declared insolvent and applied for an extension to an existing three-month moratorium – a suspension of payments to creditors. A judge in the Icelandic capital has now increased that period until 11 December.

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has won a dramatic stay of execution after finding a potential saviour who may take a controlling stake in the Irish pay-TV company. A billionaire US businessman, Leonard Blavatnik, has offered £20m for a 51% stake in Setanta and discussions between the two parties look set to continue over the weekend.

Blavatnik’s private company Access Industries is a small shareholder in Setanta and knows the business well, according to industry sources. Access also owns a controlling stake in Top-Up TV, which offers Freeview viewers a package of additional channels – including Setanta – for a fixed monthly fee.

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The Premier League has confirmed that it will examine closely the business connections of Sulaiman Al Fahim, the prospective buyer of Portsmouth, after it emerged that his company Hydra ­Properties is part of a wider business group chaired by the full brother of ­Manchester City’s new owner.

The Royal Group, a 60-strong umbrella organisation of UAE-based companies has as its chairman Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – brother of City’s owner Shiekh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

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Claims that a five-man consortium lead by an unknown north-east businessman launched a £150m bid for Newcastle United appear to be a hoax.

Earlier today, a press release on behalf of ‘Rick Parkinson’ claimed he had put together a group of investors with £150m to takeover Newcastle United, a deal which was said to include £30m for new transfers.

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