According to Sky Sports, Aethel Partners is still available to immediately inject around €60 million into the London club to overcome treasury problems, after sanctions on owner Roman Abramovich (because of connections to Vladimir Putin) closed the doors of the stadium and shops.

The Aethel Partners fund was founded in 2014 by Ricardo Santos Silva and American Aba Schubert, and has interests in several sectors: asset management, advisory, technology, metals and mining and telecommunications.

In 2019, Aethel Mining, a company of which Ricardo Santos Silva is also a co-founder, received authorisation from the Directorate-General for Energy and Geology (DGEG) to take over the “control of the iron mine” of Torre de Moncorvo, promising then to take “Portugal back to a leading position in European mining”.

Ricardo Santos Silva studied economics at the University of Lisbon and physics (mechanics) at Harvard University, according to his biography on the fund's website. He is a member of the Institute of Physics.