jonah

OK, no worries. Sure it is. Show me otherwise - there's nothing in the accounts, no claim he's ever paid a penny in as far as I'm aware. Loads of bravado about writing cheques and "I'll put in £2m if you put in £2m" after leaving us £6.5m overdrawn, but as for actual real-life non-pretend money... not a penny. Not even when he was chairman. Actually I don't blame him much for the overdraft, I mainly blame Wilde and his hired mercenaries - but who was the "king maker" who brought them to power? Crouch. He didn't do any due diligence on any of them before handing them control did he? And equally he didn't do anything much to reduce the overdraft did he? I don't think Pericard and Pearce were cheap given we had massively overspent.

You sure about that? Chortle, you wouldn't have deliberately missed out part of that sentence would you? Like, the bit which starts talking about Wilde in terms of the claim about buying Lowe's shares: "Finding investment is not easy, as Wilde found out. He couldn't even keep the much simpler claim that he had people ready to buy Lowe's shares..."

That'll be the same Crouch who (a) never put a penny into the club, (b) brought Wilde to power, © installed D&G as managers (we thought Gray and Wigley were bad enough), and (d) left the club with a £6.5m overdraft at the beginning of the season? The only thing I'm "pro" is Saints. I appreciate that's probably a rather foreign concept for you, but it's the difference between normal people and some of the posters on here who would struggle to outwit a potted begonia. Err, I think those were all facts, feel free to point out anything incorrect. Which is what exactly? A desire to keep gobsh!te Crouch out of the boardroom? The realisation that, after all the bluff and bluster has passed, it's not actually that easy to run a PLC and RL/AC were better at it than the hired help? Yes, fair cop, you've got me there... you've got me banged to rights innit. PS. Did you notice how Crouch has now decided it will be easier to find investment with the company being private, whereas just last year (whilst chairman) he stated that it would make no difference whatsoever to investment? Clueless or just a bit confused?

Chortle, good to see you still can't see simple facts through your red mist. Lowe at least raised the £30m for the stadium including finding people to underwrite the £3m Open Offer (at least 3 of whom were down to him - Lowe, Withers and Marland). Meanwhile, how much did Wilde find after ousting Lowe amidst claims that would clear the way for investment? Zero. How much did Crouch put into the club? Zero. Even when he was chairman and in charge? Zero. Finding investment is not easy, as Wilde found out. He couldn't even keep the much simpler claim that he had people ready to buy Lowe's shares... at least you'd have had to change the record if he'd managed that simple task eh. What concerns me now is that we seem to have so many stupid fans amongst the vocal minority who still can't be objective about any of this that we are in danger of recreating the same mess again when someone does make an offer - a few platitudes, a bit of fan-friendly rhetoric and it'll be "Let's Go Wilde" all over again. God help us if it's any of the previous suspects, but what price some crappy "consortium" with Crouch and a few others who bring back in the perennial hangers-on like Wiseman, McMenemy and Corbett and we then get Illingsworth & his usual suspects trying to wheedle their way in under the guise of being the Saints "Trust". Just when you think things can't get worse you realise actually very little might change.

I'm not sure "current market levels" are cheaper - the headline BOE interest rate is irrelevant, commercial property loans will be at 25 year LIBOR swap rate + a significant premium... that premium is usually 1-5% for commercial property and in the current climate I think they'd be lucky to get LIBOR + 5%. I have just seen one company with £20m *cash* negotiate an extension to their £5m overdraft at LIBOR + 2.75%... banks are lending at punitive rates.

I do wonder sometimes whether you could be any thicker - what do you think "the current board" means? Do you think Lowe might be included in that? I was grouping those who have made promises of putting in money, followed by those who sold their free shares, followed by the whole lot of them including Lowe.

Jacksons Farm is owned by SLH. It also controls the following: Southampton Football Club Limited St Mary’s Stadium Limited St Mary’s SPV Limited Southampton Mortgage & Financial Centre Limited (Non-trading) Secure Retirement Limited (Non-trading) St Michael’s Street Homes (No. 1) Limited (Non-trading) Felix Broadcasting Limited (Non-trading) South City FM Limited (Non-trading) Forest FM Limited (Non-trading) And it sold off: Southampton Insurance Services Limited Saints Radio Limited Unfortunately, those 2 sales could have scuppered the loophole as clear alternative business streams. However the Bon Jovi concert is also evidence that the stadium business is not purely football-related, as are the conferences, etc held at the stadium. At the moment I think I'll take the legal stance over the moral stance although I fear this could hinder any takeover since it's a rather huge unknown until Tuesday :-(

This is why we have legal definitions. I'm guessing the lawyers will refer to those.

Not to mention the previous and current side-lines such as the Radio Station, Catering and Insurance companies. How ironic ;-)

I think it would be appalling that they wait for administration and (probably) relegation just to save some money. Wasn't that always the beef with Lowe, he was only in it for the money? The same goes for the whole lot of them - from Crouch, Wilde and Trant all claiming they would invest but never doing so for one excuse after another, to Wiseman, Hunt, Gordon and McMenemy who cashed in their shares and have pocketed the cash whilst watching us sink. The same goes for Barclays too, the cheek of them expecting everyone else to put the cash in when they withdraw their own support! I think the most important thing of all now is that somebody completely NEW comes in to take over. If we end up with some half-baked pre-pack type arrangement with the old faces hanging on again we'll just be going round in circles. They've all had their chance and can now all bugger off, from the current board right down to Corbett and McMenemy.

Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jacksons Farm was not donated by John Corbett - he bought it on the club's behalf on the condition that they paid him back in full which they did. It was nothing more than a loan. This myth has been propagated and embellished by certain people in order to give Mary Corbett greater gravitas than is due (although obviously that loan is more than any of the last 15 Directors of SLH have loaned the club!).

I have read it, and after translating it from English into English it still reads that the overdraft is in excess of the agreed limit. Banks are quite within their rights to state that an overdraft must be reduced to a certain level by a certain date - it doesn't mean to say that it was below £4m and then somebody accidentally sent a cheque to Notts County which Barclays deliberately cashed into order to make us breach the overdraft limit just so they could close us down. Geez.

And where does it say that? Not on the Echo website. And if you try to make a new payment which would exceed your agreed overdraft the bank would refuse the payment... which suggests it wasn't a new payment at all, it was still being paid down from £6.5m. What does this have to do with the last 2 years? I can only assume you've had your head buried somewhere dark and quiet.

Gosh yes, if only we had a large arena of some sort at which to meet up. But where on earth would we find somewhere for 32,000 Saints fans to congregate to show their support? Hmmm, it's a puzzler alright.

What are you protesting about now then?

Who sent out what payment? I think the important date in all this was 31st March as that's when the accounts had to be in. We were delisted because the accounts weren't in. The accounts weren't in because the accountants wouldn't sign us off as a going concern. My interpretation is that they wouldn't do that because Barclays called in the overdraft. It's also possible that being delisted put us in breach of the NU loan notes which combined with needing to find £4.1m to repay Barclays makes us pretty much bust. Thank you Barclays. Hopefully the 1pm press conference will clarify the root cause.

As much as I dislike Wilde and everything he has done (if that wasn't clear enough from the day he first infiltrated S4E), putting aside the resentment towards him he does actually have a point. There are 2 main creditors - NU and Barclays. The NU loan notes, as far as I'm aware, are not up for renewal - the way they are structured is that Saints have to pay the interest and repayment element on an *annual basis*. The way this is structured is that the annual payment has to be placed into a separate treasury deposit account with Barclays in May, and it remains there until paid in August. Normally this is around £2.5m and is funded through advance ST sales. So in terms of the NU notes, we can't be in breach unless they have some really weird clauses in there (and I doubt it). So that leaves Barclays. We know the agreed overdraft was about £4m, and we know that it peaked at around £6m whilst Crouch was in charge. So Barclays have allowed flexibility there before. To suddenly be unable to continue as a viable business can only mean (IMO) that Barclays have thrown their toys out of the pram when we exceded the agreed level by £110k and cancelled the entire overdraft. So now we are left needing to find £4.1m to repay them, probably at very short notice too (1 month I expect). Ignore the muppets around the boardroom for a moment - as far as I can see it's Barclays who are the ones forcing our situation here, nobody else. Without that overdraft facility the club is not a going concern - hence no accounts can be signed off, hence administration. If I had a Barclays account (sadly I don't), I would be telling them exactly what I thought and moving my account elsewhere.

I thought it appropriate to dumb down my explanations to you as much as possible. If you still don't understand it after all this time I think it's unlikely it the penny will suddenly drop now... but let me have one more attempt in terms you might understand: Suppose the average length of a chip is 10cm. I'm talking about English chips here by the way, not dumbed down American crisps. If you compare 2 bags of chips, one called AIM Chips and one called Saints Chips, you can expect them to have the same average length of chip. If you looked at them one at a time you might find some AIM Chips were longer than Saints Chips initially, then nearer the end of the bags they might be round the other way. But across the bag as a whole, you might find the AIM Chips had an average length of 10.1cm and the Saints Chips might average 9.9cm. That is close but not that close, because you are using a small sample. If you compared 1000 bags of each, you'd find the averages pretty much identical. With share prices, if Saints shares are correlated to the AIM Index then you'd expect the prices to match over a long period of time - like the average length of chips would match over a large number of bags. However over a short period of time the Saints shares might be relatively lower than the AIM Index (shorter chips), but at other times they might be higher (longer chips). So over a short period of time you might find they seem quite different, much like if you picked a single chip from the 2 bags then a Saints Chip could be half the length of an AIM Chip. But you'd not be the fizziest drink in the fridge to hold your stumpy Saints Chip in the air and declare they are nothing like AIM Chips just because you found a short one. Tomorrow I will use bricks to explain why the quoted share price is not the value of the major shareholders' shares. Or I might just poke my eyes out instead.

Did you see a program on BBC2 a month or so ago called Million Dollar Traders? You remind me of the dozy bint who seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown every time the share price moved a little bit. So some bloke in Basingstoke sells 5000 shares @ 9p and that HUGE, M-A-S-S-I-V-E £450 trade is somehow a damning indictment of how the entire company is run?! I'm almost tempted to put in some rolling eyed crayon effects but I don't want my new stalker to reappear after I finally threw off the previous one...

If he broadcast such that he was stating it as fact from an "insider source", then he's in danger of creating a false market which is market abuse (you don't have to have any intention of trading shares yourself, it's the result of your actions/comments that matters). Meanwhile I would guess that the head of Radio Hants received a telephone call from SMS this morning...

I could never get used to the chaffing underwear.

I wasn't aware he was drawing any salary, but I'm sure the accounts will clarify. When we got relegated his salary was reduced to £140k - so I would imagine at worst he is drawing £56k for 2 days per week. So not even as much as it costs to have Lawrie turn up on a Saturday in hospitality, quite a bit less than the £200k they were paying Hone alone, and some way off the Dulieu + Oldknow + Hone + Hoos costs in excess of £500k pa eh Crayon Boy ;-) You're right, it's all just a fantasy, I sit at a computer in my garden shed playing Wagazoo all day.

I suspect you and I have different ideas over the definition of "sensible people". My list wouldn't include Keeley Hazel, Ali G and Noel Edmonds.

Eh? If you're having trouble reading the words perhaps you could find someone close by to read it out loud for you... what I said was the exact opposite, if you do a 3 year graph you will see SOO is pretty much matching the AIM index.