REPORTS that Arab sheikhs have targeted five more Premier League clubs should ring alarm bells for anyone who cares for the future of the game.

Not that you can do anything to stop filthy-rich foreign owners muscling in when there are no home-based businessmen prepared to make the necessary financial commitment.

My biggest worry is not necessarily the foreign invasion – although that is worrying enough – but the Premier League’s apparent inability to conduct its own checks and balances – the “fit and proper persons test” – on the people who are stumping up the cash.

For, while they actually claim their rules on the ownership of clubs are some of the most stringent of any UK industry and that they must abide by UK and European law, the reality is that – against an avalanche of opposition from leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – they shamelessly sanctioned Dr Thaksin Shinawatra’s takeover of Manchester City in July 2007.

Not only were there serious questions over Shinawatra’s human rights record during his five years as Thailand prime minister before he was ousted in a military coup in 2006, but he’d also had £1billion of assets seized by the country’s military rulers and faced serious corruption charges.

The fact that the exiled Shinawatra, pictured, who sold his stake in Manchester City to the Abu Dhabi Group for £225m in August – making an estimated profit of £50m – has since been convicted of corruption, sentenced to two years in prison in his absence and subsequently banned from even setting foot in Britain, suggests he is not and never was a “fit and proper person”.

There is even talk of City stripping him of his title of honorary president.

Let’s hope the Premier League don’t use the law as a convenient excuse to just sit back and do nothing next time a dodgy character pops up on the radar.