jonah

Let's be honest, a secured loan to SFC is not exactly some unprecedented philanthropic gesture is it. When you've just driven a bus into a brick wall you can hardly claim a medal just because you performed CPR on one of the passengers whilst waiting for the ambulance. There is another issue to *any* loan like this which I've not seen explained by Mark Fry - the longer this is dragged out, the longer time-wasters will keep us hanging on, the more money Fry will charge, and ultimately there's a case for stating it's less likely we'll find a buyer... as well as repaying the SFC loan, there are Fry's increased charges to pay, and as time goes on both of those additional costs are rising whilst we generate no revenue. The player's wages are guaranteed by the FA (or FL) so the sooner this is brought to an end the cheaper the club is to buy.

What if the best bid is from a company that wants to demolish the stadium and build industrial units or an office block? I don't think they'd care about the football club, that's not their business. And Fry wouldn't care, his duty is to extract maximum cash for the creditors (and himself). I think/hope it's unlikely such a situation would arise as the bid would be too low for NU to accept, particularly as it would devalue SFC, but we can't be sure. I think the bidders need to work backwards to value the stadium, they need to consider what SFC can afford to pay in rent - previously we paid £2.4m pa which included capital repayment, but suppose in Div1 we can only realistically afford £1m pa to rent it. If the stadium sold for £10m that would be a 10% yield which is damn good for commercial property... so hopefully the commerical property yield values the stadium at a higher price than it does for redevelopment but we can't be sure without full knowledge of the figures (including what NU will accept).

It just means that we're not officially in talks with anyone to sell SLH as a whole, ie. by selling the shares. We already knew that really, and the last part confirms the administrators are still looking at selling off the assets, ie. the stadium and football club. On the downside it's pretty much confirmation the shares are worthless as nobody is bidding for the whole of SLH (though going into administration doesn't automaticaly imply the shares become worthless), which also means there is the risk that there is a non-football bid on the cards for one or more of the assets, eg. the stadium. On the plus side this could be a sign that they are getting things sorted in terms of offers. But that's grasping at straws a little I think.

So to summarise your point, Crouch already knew full well that Wilde didn't have the £2m and therefore his "offer" was nothing more than a cheap PR stunt to gain fan kudos (and which he deliberately leaked), as opposed to being a genuine attempt to rescue the club. He sounds as morally bankrupt as Wilde then.

Only an idiot would expect someone to pay £2m for the privilege of having themselves removed. I said, only an idiot would expect someone to pay £2m for the privilege of having themselves removed. Especially when Wilde could pay £2m and remove Crouch from the equation for good instead. I think you need to stop there. There's no point trying to justify who is the better, let's just get shot of all of them and start again.

IIRC he placed a massive short straddle on the Nikkei (a bet against volatility)... but the Kobe earthquake hit that night. Incredibly bad luck really, but it wasn't like he wasn't just a pure gambler by that time anyway. Of course Lowe hiring him on £30k in the UK directly translates to him being responsible for the £800m losses Leeson fraudulently hid in 88888 and the collapse of Barings, and I'm surprised Crouch and Lawrie haven't picked up on this yet. Expect it in the Echo tomorrow...

I'll tell you what though, on a serious point SCW is just the sort of person whose attention to detail would have meant we had players confident and capable of scoring a bleedin penalty - not only the playoff against Derby, how many points did we lose this season because "professionals" couldn't score from 12 yards out? Without MLT's almost-perfect record we'd have been relegated from the Prem in the 90s. (Sorry for the sidetrack!)

Not to mention the fact that if Wilde and Lowe were prepared to put in £2m each they would have had the £4m to clear Barclays and keep Crouch out for good (a nice dilutive placing would have done the trick there). As for undermining the management of the team by attaching conditions over their sacking for providing funding, well the man's obviously a motivational genius.

It is quite a funny anecdote really. Of course quite how that translates to blaming RL for the entire collapse of Barings is just as funny, but it's a bit of a corker and I'm not surprised it's a favourite tale. I hope you're not jealous that he tells that story more than your phone call, Duncan ;-) Things don't change that much, but regulation in Asia was always well behind the curve and there are plenty more dodgy examples from HK and Tokyo - and more recently, even with much more modern systems and increased supervision we have had similar episodes like Jerome Kerviel.

0 points. A very disappointing effort, nearly as poor as their doners.

Chortle, Lowe Urban Myth Number 7 - I hope it was copied accurately from the Ugly! Here's another one, only genuine: Restaurant in central Southampton just after the EGM in 2006. After being repeatedly disturbed during his meal by "B", "A" tells him to "p!ss off and go finish your meal and leave us to finish ours". Once "B" is out of earshot "A" continues... "the bloke's a complete w*nker". Who are "A" and "B"? Bonus point if you can guess the restaurant ;-)

Ahh yes I remember Wilde being tempted by the cheap beer on offer... IIRC those of us who pointed out the incredible lack of professionalism in keeping Derby's board waiting were put firmly in our places with reminders of how wonderful it was to finally have a chairman who preferred to spend time with fans rather than hob-nobbing with other chairmen. Maybe GM will dig out those classic quotes too :-)

If only I could highlight a pertinent piece in your posts this would all be so much easier... So now you're basically saying with Lowe in charge for 10 years it was actually easy to acquire a large shareholding and buy out the club (that should draw some good replies), but that once Wilde bought 15% it became impossible?! Bearing in mind most of that 15% came straight from Paul Thompson, there was bugger all difference in terms of stock available and the other 85% was still there. But all of this conveniently ignores the point that you don't need to own a single share to make a formal bid - as shown by SISU - and hence it's all a load of nonsense propagated by the anti-Lowe brigade over a long period of time to try to make people believe that lack of investment was down to Lowe being in charge.

Well as Wilde capably demonstrated it was very easy to get 30% which is enough to be required to make a formal offer. None of which precludes *anyone* from choosing to make a formal offer at any time - the existing board simply present the offer together with their recommendation... unless, like in the case of SISU, they can ascertain pdq that a majority don't want it and hence reject it without the costs of formalities. It would be interesting to know what it was that caused them all to reject it.

Yeah those listed companies are a real bugger to buy, it's not like there's an orderly regulated market place to buy your shares, house brokers and a well-defined formal process by which to make an offer for the company irrespective of the wishes of minor shareholders. Yep, you got me there good and proper.

Do you know whether anyone stated the stadium would be owned outright as a result of this? I'm just wondering whether Norwich Union wouldn't be more interested in restructuring that debt rather than taking a significant recovery cut of say 50%?

Fair point, it's not really the same given the change on the debts so probably not a great comparison. It all depends on what can be negoatiated on those debts of course...

I'm not sure how you see that working out though, they can't really buy SFC without the stadium and Jackson's Farm has a fairly fixed value to it. So that's 90% of the package anyway - closing down SLH and winding up a few minor companies is no effort. But if they wait too long surely all that will happen is Mark Fry will start a fire sale of our better players to fund his bill for another month and pay the staff their wages. ie. it will decimate the value of SFC as all the value will be extracted and no value retained. The only people who win from that situation are the administrators, staff don't care how they get paid so no difference to them, and for the buyers and fans it's a disaster. Given the wages deadilne in 15 days time, I'd say we need to have a buyer signing on the dotted line by next Monday at the latest otherwise we'll be little more than SFC by name whoever buys us.

Ahh Wes, many's the time I'd liked to have put you out of your misery and done everyone a favour. Unfortunately that seems to be illegal although apparently for just £15.99 I can get you spayed and given a tick bath? I used the phrase "nobody is buying", not to imply that it will never happen, but to show that even now after all these weeks and 30-something expressions of interest, we are really no nearer to finding anyone interested in buying the club. Until someone signs a contract there is no sale, no matter how you choose to interpret anything. Funnily enough Henry Winter in the Telegraph talks about Mark Fry looking for £15-20m which he (Winter) considers to be "relatively cheap". Interesting because the denser sections of this board have tried to imply that share prices around 10-20p put off potential investors when that corresponds to a market cap of only £2.8-£5.6m, a quarter of the bargain basement price we're on offer for now. Indeed, Lowe's old comment about someone buying the club for £25m, which so many enjoyed misinterpreting, clearly ties in with both Winter's and Fry's view of the value of the club even in these desperate times. But back to my original point, it is patently clear that the share price was no obstacle whatsoever.

No, what he stated as fact was that they were separate legal entities - which they are. Of course Crouch Potato then stuck his foot in it on Five Live by claiming Mystic Meg abilities over our corporate structure 8 years before the points penalties were introduced, but the fact remains that holding company controlled a stadium company, football company, catering, radio, insurance, healthcare, property and probably several other dormant companies. So to turn your question back around, it's you who hasn't explained what the hell you are talking about...

It's a holding company, what did you expect it to do differently? It's a holding company, what sort of business plan did you want it to have? It was a requirement under rule 34, there was no choice at the time. Enormous? Compared to what, working in MacDonalds? Keep it in perspective, when it was Lowe & Cowen we paid average CEO salaries like Bolton and Charlton with performance bonuses. It was only when Wilde brought in twice as many execs to run the same club in the CCC on half the budget that the exec remuneration got out of kilter. The only people dissuaded by the share price were people without 2 brass farthings to rub together. As evidenced by the fact nobody is buying the club even when it's dirt cheap in administration. In reality the share price was low and this actually prevented rights issues and placing from being more viable (not that Wilde & Co were ever going to do that as they'd have to invest their money as promised).

Nice conspiracy theory but Forest are safe, the game is a bit of a non-event really and hence no big deal.

Pre-Lowe's return, we overspent by £6.5m/2 = £3.25m each season (it's actually a bit more as we had cash too but let's keep the numbers simple). When Lowe returned we were then forced to *underspend* by £2.5m to reduce the overdraft for Barclays. So if "Lowe's choice of manager" had been given £3.25m + £2.5m = £5.75m more to spend this season like his predecessors, do you think we'd have stayed up still? Does anyone really believe that having another £5.75m spending power wouldn't have won us another 2 points over 38 matches? Therefore, surely it's more logical to deduce that it was this incredible drop in spending power which led to relegation - in which case, it's a question of why we f***ed up the finances so badly that we had to do this. A tiny part of it is down to the credit crunch, but generally it was down to negligence on the part of the execs and chairmen in overspending. Anyone can make mistakes with managers and players with the best intentions (and with hindsight), but it's a special kind of idiot who deliberately spends money we don't have which leads us into administration. It was only a part of the reason because it wasn't redressed in 2 years. One of the few things Jim Hone actually figured out correctly was that in not accepting the SISU deal they would then have to sell players sharpish. Unfortunately he was too late in working it out and it was his own negligence that saw our wage bill spiral to 81% - who thinks Rupert "tight-fisted, never invests in the team" would have allowed that to happen?

Because the obsession is usually with supporting the club, not hating an ex-chairman of the PLC?

Well we know he thinks it's all a bit "pantomime villain" and I'm sure after 13 years of abuse he's quite thick-skinned about it so probably doesn't think it's a big deal. After all, it's an away game, nothing riding on it now, invited by Forest, why should anyone really care? Not to mention it was Barclays pulling the £6.5m overdraft that caused the administration, not him. So it cuts both ways, to me any fans "feeling sick" about it are a bit unbalanced and lacking in perspective. Players leave us all the time and come with other teams, so do managers. Hoddle, Beattie, Redknapp, all worthy of booing and a bit of atmosphere, but blind hated and rage? The only time I can think I came anywhere near such a feeling was when Alan Ball returned with Man City and I drove 900 miles through the night to make sure I was there to give him some stick ;-)