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Post by stuartB on Sept 11, 2018 21:26:31 GMT
i don't post on here very often but after today's contribution, all i can say is...... liar liar pants on fire!!
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rjdgull
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Post by rjdgull on Sept 11, 2018 22:05:39 GMT
Dave - thanks for posting some of your thoughts on what was a very turbulent tenure in charge of the club. I have no doubt that you and your fellow remaining directors acted in the best interests of the club and in good faith but this was severely hampered initially off the pitch as your consortium disintegrated around you and on it as results did not go our way. I can only imagine what it was like to operate in a very pressurised situation in a high profile position for which you were not familiar with and had no time to acclimatise to with a lack of funds.
Having said that, I think a number of mistakes were made which ultimately led to the imminent threat of administration. The first great escape was achieved at a massive cost with the loan that led to your board giving the club to the not the best of bedfellows. Bad advice given and due diligence on your part I suspect. Rather than accept this loan at all costs maybe relegation and sustainability as a part time club should have been considered or involved the TUST at an early stage to see what funds could have been raised.and create a broader ownership structure.
Out of interest was the detached house price tag to pay off your liability to GI? Also it is my understanding that you did hold discussions with the Mayor about the freehold - is this incorrect?
I appreciate there is only so much you can say on a public forum but any response to the various questions raised would be appreciated.
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Jon
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Post by Jon on Sept 12, 2018 0:10:40 GMT
the idea that we the previous directors were dangling the carrot of the freehold of Plainmoor to possible owners is nonsense.It wasn't ours to dangle.It was made very clear that we didn't hold the freehold and any negotiations would be between them and Torbay Council. It wasn't yours, but you could still dangle it. You were holding meetings with Gordon Oliver about obtaining the freehold. It was only the prospect of the freehold that gave you any hope of receiving "the price of detached house" for something bought for £1. Clearly this tactic was going to attract investors interested in land rather than benefactors interested in Torquay United. this quickly disintigrated into just 4 of us.This was going to be unsustainable. It was absolutely extremely clear that it was not sustainable. That is why I am so frustrated that you did not admit this, take what help was offered and unite the fanbase around a rescue plan. Instead, you ran the the club to the brink of administration and pretended all was well. In so doing, you divided the fan base by claiming that those who showed concern over our precarious position were "rocking the boat". I spent the next 18 months at the club trying to get new investors in, we realised we were only a plug to fill the hole on a temporary basis. If you recall Thea Bristow paid a considerable sum to Kelvin Thomas to find new owners, after many attempts and 6 months of trying the quest failed. Yes - exactly. Kelvin Thomas, with all his football contacts, failed to sell a debt-free club for £1. That surely proved that the white knight with a love for TUFC and a million quid in the bank did not exist. So why spend eighteen months pinning all of your hopes on finding one - and why expect him to pay the price of a detached house for the privilege of taking over a by now debt-laden club? we now arrived at May 2015 when it looked like the club would fold. I think the risk of closure at that point was very small, but fully accept that you were misled by Dean Edwards and genuinely believed this to be the case. indeed the money was swallowed up with the signings of the likes of Blisset and Racchi etc. These signings in no small way led to the first GREAT ESCAPE. But surely the players brought in by Kevin Nicholson were replacements for players he had moved off the payroll - not additional expenditure. All of Blissett's wages were more than recouped by the transfer fee we received for him - not to mention fees received for MacDonald and Lavercombe. Racchi was a free agent - released by Tamworth. It has been well documented that we were just 24 hours from administration in Dec 2016, the administrators were actually in our boardroom to sign the documents. You seem to think we would be surprised that the club was so close to administration. Far from it. People had been warning this was inevitable for eighteen months. You admit yourself that your setup was never sustainable. You only hung on as long as you did through transfer windfalls and borrowing from a dubious source. I am sure people could have advised you how that was bound to end. We the directors were advised by our legal team that the best solution to avoid admin was to hand the club to GI, who had already put substantial loans into the club. This route meant also that we 4 directors would lose our investments, up to 50k, Obviously you had painted yourselves into a corner where you had no options. Very frustratingly, people had been warning you for eighteen months that you were painting yourselves into a corner where you would have no options but you refused to listen. It ended up how it was bound to end up. Your due diligence made it absolutely clear that you had to accept that you would lose your money when you first put it in. The previous board all lost their money and knew full well that they would when they put it in. None of them tried to leverage the freehold to recoup their losses. we managed to hold the fort together for over 18 months. If you accept the mantra that some are keen to promote that it is totally impossible to run a football club in Torquay, then you bought the club another 18 months. If you do not swallow the mantra that it is totally impossible to run a football club in Torquay, then you have been responsible for denying an opportunity to restructure a debt-free club and landing us in a position where we now need a property developer to waive a million pound loan in order to give us a chance of survival. |
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hector
TFF member
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Post by hector on Sept 12, 2018 5:57:13 GMT
If you accept the mantra that some are keen to promote that it is totally impossible to run a football club in Torquay, then you bought the club another 18 months. If you do not swallow the mantra that it is totally impossible to run a football club in Torquay, then you have been responsible for denying an opportunity to restructure a debt-free club and landing us in a position where we now need a property developer to waive a million pound loan in order to give us a chance of survival. That's a bit sharp, Jon. Who has run the club successfully? In essence, Thea just underwrote the losses. Whilst you know I will never badmouth Thea, I would suggest that her tenure was the wasted opportunity to restructure the club into something that could turn a profit. She certainly handed over a debt-free club but she did not hand over a club that was a self-financing enterprise. That was the juncture at which any new board had to work out how to reverse the losses, whilst having no cash reserves to run the club, during that process. Debt-free on Monday didn't mean it would still be debt-free on Friday. And as we know, those losses rapidly went into freefall. Aided by the pointless and costly sacking of Hargreaves and then having to pay two managers plus their respective assistants. |
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hector
TFF member
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Post by hector on Sept 12, 2018 18:42:30 GMT
Aided by the pointless and costly sacking of Hargreaves and then having to pay two managers plus their respective assistants. Ha ha. You'll have to remind me why we shouldn't have gotten rid of Hargreaves, whose subsequent behaviour took him from hero to zero in my book. And unfortunately no matter who is the manager, they'll expect to get paid. There were not really any footballing reasons to keep Hargreaves but if you’re that strapped for cash that the gates were almost locked, then sacking the manager, continuing to pay him and another one, probably wasn’t the highest priority. |
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