Reports: St. Louis Rams’ owners to sell team to Illinois businessman; NFL approval needed

Reports: Rams to be sold to Illinois businessman

ST. LOUIS — The majority owners of the St. Louis Rams have reached an agreement to sell the team to an Illinois businessman who doesn’t want to move the team, according to published reports Thursday.

Both STLtoday.com, the Web site for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the online newspaper Globe-Democrat.com cited unidentified sources in disclosing the pending sale to Shahid Khan of Urbana, Ill.

Calls from The Associated Press to the Rams, Khan and the NFL office were not immediately returned Thursday. Any sale would need to be approved by NFL owners.

League sources told STLtoday.com that Khan is a Rams fan who is committed to keeping the team in St. Louis.

Khan is the 55-year-old president of an auto parts manufacturer, Flex-N-Gate, in Urbana. STLtoday.com reported that he will purchase the 60 percent of the Rams owned by Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez, the children of famed Rams owner Georgia Frontiere.

Forbes magazine has estimated the Rams franchise has a value of $929 million, though some experts have said a more realistic sale price will be closer to $750 million.

According to federal court records in Illinois, the Internal Revenue Service accused Khan and his wife, Ann, of improperly sheltering $250 million in income between 1999 and 2003, reducing their taxes by $85 million. In an interview with The (Champaign) News-Gazette in early 2009, Shahid Khan said the couple paid the IRS $68 million to settle the dispute, but insisted he’d done nothing wrong.

“There isn’t a hint of a criminal issue here,” Khan told the newspaper, saying he planned to try to get the money back through litigation. It isn’t clear whether he’s taken legal steps since then to recover the money.

Khan did not immediately return calls to his home or company by The Associated Press. An IRS spokesman declined comment.

Forbes last year ranked Flex-N-Gate as the 229th largest private company in the U.S., with an estimated $2.14 billion in annual revenue. The company says on its Web site that it has more than 9,500 employees at plants and other facilities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Spain.

The sale of the Rams has been expected since Frontiere’s death in January 2008. Her children are both involved in other interests and neither has ties to St. Louis.

A group headed by St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts was also interested in purchasing the Rams. Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was initially part of the Checketts group but was dropped in October after adverse publicity about his involvement.

The sale has raised concerns in St. Louis, which lost the Cardinals franchise after the 1987 season when Bill Bidwill moved the franchise to Arizona. Several games last season were not sold out, though that was partly due to the on-field performance — at 1-15, the Rams had the worst record in the league.

The NFL passed over St. Louis for the smaller Jacksonville, Fla., market when it awarded an expansion team in 1993. Two years later, civic leaders convinced Frontiere, a St. Louis native, to move the team from Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest market, back to her hometown.

A loophole in the Rams’ lease allows them to move as early as 2014 if the Edward Jones Dome is not deemed among the top quarter of all NFL stadiums by various measurements. The dome is fast becoming one of the league’s older venues, and getting it into the top quarter seems unlikely.

Associated Press writer David Mercer in Champaign, Ill., contributed to this report.