Football agent who arranged Emiliano Sala’s flight could be involved in inquest

The football agent who helped arrange the flight that killed Emiliano Sala has not yet responded to requests to participate in the inquest into the death.

Mr Sala died at just 28 while he was flying in a small plane over the English Channel on his way to join Cardiff City – after the team offered him £15 million to transfer from Nantes in France.

The plane crashed on the evening of January 21, 2019, and Mr Sala died alongside pilot David Ibbotson, 59.

The flight had been organised by Mr Sala’s football agent, William McKay, and David Henderson, 67.

Henderson was supposed to fly the plane himself but instead, he went on holiday to Paris with his wife and asked Mr Ibbotson – who had no commercial pilot licence – to fly Mr Sala across the Channel.

Henderson was later jailed for endangering the safety of the aircraft.

Now the coroner looking into the tragedy, Rachael Griffen, wants to speak to Mr McKay as an ‘interested person’.

She told a pre-inquest review hearing she had emailed Mr McKay and sent a letter to the home address she had on record on December 6 last year, but she has not yet had a response.

She said: ‘I have received no response to that correspondence and what I am going to ask detective inspector Simon Huxter to do on our behalf is make an inquiry to try and ascertain whether we have the correct email address and home address for Mr McKay to confirm whether we are corresponding with him at the correct address.’

As an interested person, Mr McKay would be entitled to participate in the inquest either directly or through a lawyer by receiving copies of evidence, asking questions of witnesses and making submissions on the law to the coroner.

Previous hearings have heard that Henderson has ‘no further evidence’ to give ‘beyond that which he gave at his criminal trial’.

His original trial at Cardiff Crown Court heard Mr McKay had not ‘pressured’ him into organising the flight.

This deadly flight was not the first time Henderson and Mr Ibbotson had conducted an illegal trip.

Mr Ibbotson regularly flew for Henderson, despite not having the qualification require to fly at night and the fact that his rating to fly the single-engine Piper Malibu had expired.

Before Mr Sala’s flight, Henderson had received a message from another person who had flown with Mr Ibbotson, describing his flying as ‘all over the place’.

Prosecutor Martin Goudie QC branded Henderson ‘reckless or negligent’ in the way he operated the plane, putting his business above the safety of passengers by using an authorised plane and hiring pilots neither qualified nor competent to complete the flights.

The inquest is set to begin on February 14 in Bournemouth and is expected to continue until April.