HANG ON Manchester City: you might be joining the Funded by Foreign Billions Football League after all.

It has been six weeks since Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand who was ousted in a military coup last year, announced he wanted to buy the club.

Last week, it seemed his ambitions would be dashed when it emerged that the Thai government had frozen assets worth up to $1.6 billion (£810m), apparently leaving Thaksin slightly strapped for cash.

But now I’m told Thaksin’s prospects might not be so gloomy after all. In fact I hear that more than ample cash – at least £150m – is already deposited in UK banks untouched by the Thai government.

The money has apparently been siting there for some months in escrow accounts in the name of Seymour Pierce, Thaksin’s financial advisers, to prove that he had the ability to finance the deal for the Blues.

This cheery news – cheery at least for those who favour a Thaksin takeover – was just about the only bright spot for the ex-PM in recent weeks.

A statement from Thailand’s anticorruption Assets Examination Committee last week said: “The committee found evidence that Thaksin, during his time as prime minister, committed corruption and illegal acts as well as being unusually rich.”

It came two weeks after Thaksin was banned from politics for five years.

Last week Thaksin’s lawyer mentioned that his boss “may need to use some of the money that has been frozen”.

But if the Seymour Pierce cash really is there for the taking, the £90m price tag needed to buy the Ofex-listed Premiership club now seems within reach.

- HERE’S just what the world needs . . . another star-studded golf tournament. Supermodel Jodie Kidd and a few chums, including former footballer Gary Lineker, will be teeing off next month at the new Ryder Cup course at Celtic Manor in Wales. It’s all in a good cause, though, as Kidd hopes to raise a bundle for three charities – the NSPCC, The Monsoon Accessorize Trust and Greatwood.

Sugar's challenge to TV show critics

IT’S been a stressful few weeks for Sir Alan Sugar, the nononsense Amstrad boss and star of the BBC’s Apprentice show, so I called to see how he was faring.

“Simon [Ambrose, the winning contestant who bagged a £100,000 job] starts on Monday, so we’ll see how we’re doing then,” barked Sugar.

The goofy 27-year-old will be set to work on Sugar’s new £80m property development near Stansted airport.

Sugar dismissed criticism that the show had dumbed down, especially due to his semi-finalist Katie Hopkins’s toe-curling kiss-and-tell revelations to the News of the World.

“What she gets up to in her private life is up to her – it’s her business abilities that concerned me,” said Sugar.

“The critics don’t see the pressure contestants are under. I think they should all be rounded up, put into two teams, then I’ll give them a task and see what they’re made of.”

Any takers? Applications through Prufrock please.

HERE’S an idea for that bumper bonus. In September you’ll have the chance to splash out on a piece of Concorde. Airbus is set to auction a cache of spares from the retired airliner. For those with a penchant for supersonic chic, there will be more than 800 items up for sale, ranging from machmeters (the pulse-racing dial that told pilots how many times faster than the speed of sound they were flying) worth about €2,000 (£1,350) each, through to big chunks of engines. It’s all for charity – but perhaps Airbus is also hoping to attract a side offer for those new superjumbo A380s it is struggling to sell.

- SO Zac Goldsmith, the fresh-faced socialite and prospective MP, is taking on big business.

The Tory candidate for Richmond Park in London took to the Friction TV website on Friday to attack J Sainsbury – and encourage the people of Barnes to do so too. He wants to torpedo plans to build a giant supermarket there.

It’s something to do with being green, but unfortunately I got distracted by a better speech on the website by Nick Ferrari, the LBC radio presenter, entitled We need global warming. His case was we need more bikinis and swimming pools – much more entertaining than trolley talk.

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