A Hong Kong court on Monday found Birmingham City owner Carson Yeung guilty of five counts of money laundering.

The 54-year-old businessman had denied laundering HK$720 million (£55m) between 2001 and 2007.

Judge Douglas Yau said Yeung was “self-contradictory” in his testimony and that he was “making it up as he went along” to a courthouse packed full of reporters and members of the public.

The tycoon, wearing a dark suit, appeared calm as the verdict was read out.

Yeung was arrested and charged with ill-gotten gains in June 2011, two years after he acquired the club.

Yeung, who was little known prior to his emergence in English football, took control of the club in October 2009 in an £81m takeover from David Sullivan and David Gold, now the co-owners of West Ham.

In February Yeung resigned as chairman and executive director of Birmingham International Holdings Limited (BIHL), which owns the struggling second-tier club.

Yeung, whose Cantonese name is Yeung Ka-sing, emerged in 2007 with a bid for Birmingham. The takeover attempt failed when he missed the deadline to hand over money.

-Culled from The Guardian UK

He quietly acquired a 29.9% stake and in 2009, Yeung’s Grandtop International Holdings – which later became BIHL – bought the club from Sullivan and Gold.

Throughout the trial, Yeung and the prosecution painted differing pictures of how the businessman’s wealth was amassed.

Yeung maintained he accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars through stock trading, hairdressing, business ventures in mainland China and a keen interest in gambling.

He said he made HK$20m as a hairdresser between 1989 and 1994, when he ran five upmarket hair salons in hotels, including Hong Kong’s five-star Peninsula Hotel.

Yeung described himself as a “very famous” hairdresser, claiming his salons catered to movie stars and businessmen.

He also said he spent “all” of his time trading stocks after the 1998 Asian stock market crash, accumulating a stock portfolio of about HK$300m by 2007.

Yeung also told the court he made up to HK$30m from gambling in Macau between 2004 and 2008, adding that he gambled as if he were “running a business”.

However, in his verdict on Monday Yau said there were reasonable grounds to believe that multiple business dealings with which Yeung was involved had made use of funds which represented “proceeds of an indictable offence”.