Carson Yeung has secured more than 90 per cent of English Premier League club Birmingham City, and can now complete a compulsory purchase of the remaining shares, enabling former owner David Sullivan to make a bid for West Ham United, currently in the hands of Icelandic banks.

Yeung has spent US$16.2 million to add another 12.3 per cent of the club's shares to the books of his Grandtop Holdings company. Last month he spent US$68 million for 51.8 per cent of the shares. Added to the 29.9 per cent he already owned, those figures mean it is now a question of when not if the remaining shares are sold.

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A statement from Grandtop confirmed: "As at 1pm on October 6, 2009, Grandtop owned or had received valid acceptances of the offer in respect of a total of 76,620,136 Birmingham City shares representing in aggregate approximately 94% of the current issued share capital of Birmingham City."

David Sullivan, the club's former co-owner, is expected to launch a takeover bid for West Ham, currently in the hands of Icelandic banks, in the near future. "Half of me would like to have three months off after leaving Birmingham but I want to stay in football," he told the Daily Mirror newspaper. It is thought his former co-owner, David Gold, is also keen to join him in the venture. The two men are former shareholders in the club, and Gold was a West Ham youth player. "All of my young life I spent there, so I'll always have an affiliation with West Ham until the day I die - I can't not have that," he said in August.

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According to reports, Sullivan and the Gold brothers, David and Ralph, are due the money for their combined shareholding in five working days.