Clapham Saint

For the CVA to be approved 75% (by value) of creditors must vote in favour. In adition 50% of creditors voting and not connected with the Company (i.e. directors, shreholders etc. etc.) must vote in favour. The other factor to consider though is who owes money to HMRC? At the moment SLH is in administration. It is the amounts owed to creditors of SLH which are important to approve a CVA of SLH.

Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on football clubs (no doubt you have some specialist knowledge of football employment contracts to go along side the all encompassing insolvency knowledge which you were professing to have a couple of weeks ago, only to later admit that this came down to once having being a shareholder in a company which went into administration ), however I do have some limited experience of dealing with contractors being deemed to be employees. Some factors which were of particlar relevance were: The Company paying Income tax and NIC on the "employee's" behalf The Company providing the tools of trade Ability or otherwise of the "employee" to work for a number of other Companies In the case of the relationship between footballers and football clubs I would suggest that these point towards the players being employees. There are other factors but I can't remember them all off the top of my head. I have no doubt that you will be able to trag up 1 which suggests that the players are contractors but I think that the intention of the engagement is clealy that of an employer/employee relationshp. Exactly

Have the council not indicated that they will not consent to any application for change of use as well? Possible maybe but I would have thought only a very very remote possibility. Doing this would involve setting up a new venture, employing managers (or giving profit share away to the council so that they can), ongoing costs from monitoring etc. I would very surprised if they wouldn't prefer a clean break but no doubt we will have to disagree on that one. Agreed. There will have to be an element of debt forgiveness (in fact I expect a lot). Although Norwich Union hold a number of cards they are not all aces and so there will have to be some give and take.

Can't argue with the general principle but I would imagine that the break up value would be pretty low. What happens (and I don't know the answer to this from a football league perspective) to player registrations in the event that the club ceases to trade and goes into liquidation? My guess would be that as employees of the club the squad would all be released and would therefore be worth absolutely nothing to Mr. Fry. Obviously something that he wants to avoid. A liquidator wouldn't be running the club as a business and so there would be no games played. If players weren't allowed to move on frees automatically under fotball league regulations then I would have thought that they would have pretty good grounds for a bosman style court case. Either way this results in no money for Mr. Fry or Barclays/Aviva. In my opinion the price paid for the club is much more likely to be dictated by the consortiums out bidding each other rather than the break up value of the assets.

http://bean-counter.mybrute.com Bring it! :smt075

I am as far away from being even close to ITK as it is possible to get but that would be my guess. Its quite possible though that there may be other big payments coming up that we haven't thought of or that Mr. Fry has set his own deadline just to speed things up.

Love the closing comment quoting Mark Fry. Lol!

Shall we wait until we know that we have ended the decline before we make these sorts of statements...?

I hate starting responses like this (but seem to all the time on this forum unfortunately) but "it depends". I don't think that the "administration side" of things should make any difference to potential investors willingness to see a deal through to completion. If they get fed up and walk away now then they probably would have done so if the administration hadn't happened anyway. Buying companies takes time if they are serious they will have known this before they started. One of the advantages of the administration process is that it can offer a clean break. A purchaser doesn't have the buy the club warts and all he/she can buy just the elements that they want to take forward. If you ignore the football league complications administration makes things easier in many respects. A purchaser can just buy the assets that he wants without taking on any of the liabilities. A purchaser is dealing with a single person (the Administrator) and does not have to get around division of opinion at board level or other conflicting shareholders etc The only real complication is that there is a point at which if the Administrator does not think that a deal can be done he will accept that there is no buyer and close the club down. In my opinion however the eventuality where the club is closed for good is very very unlikely. At the moment Mr Fry is incurring costs in keeping the club going. The next big payment will be wages due at the end of the month. I'm pretty confident that Mr Fry will have no intention of paying those wages. He will want to sell the club before then and leave the wages to the new owner. Lets say there are 3 interested parties in negotiations. They will each have their own business plans and their own level of funding. At the moment Mr Fry will be trying to get them to out bid each other increasing the price as high as possible. Slowly but surely the bidders will either up their bids in competition or they will pull out leaving the way clear for the other consortium(s). If all 3 (?) bidders pull out it will be a disaster for Mr. Fry. Not only will he have raised nothing at all for the creditors he will have incurred a bucket load of expenses (player wages/ solicitors fees/ his fees/ the milk man etc)) in doing so. The longer than this drags on the greater the urgency to complete a deal for all concerned. My advice if you aren't ITK and want to stay sane is to try to calm down and wait and see. (Bit of a ramble but I can't really be bothered to go back through re-ordering the points so I hope it doesn’t read too badly.)

All depends upon when the takeover finally fell away. Also there will also be many other factors which we don't know about becuase we don't have all the information. Sadly bickering about what happened is a never ending agrument as neither camp were perfect and so there will always be points, however big or small, that can be picked upon to attack whoever RL, MW LC etc... A part of me wants everything out in the open so that I can fully vent my anger however right now there are more important things to worry about than giving me (or others) the chance to shout abuse and blame at Lowe and Wilde. As soon as we have a purchaser and can feel as though we are in a position to start to make progress I will feel a lot calmer.

So as to not be unprepared should the takeover not go through perhaps? Not saying that LC was perfect or that both "sides" won't have made mistakes but having a 3 year plan sounds sensible to me, even if you are hoping that it won't be needed.

I know that if we had stayed up on merit then the 10 point penalty would have applied this season in order to take us down. However I was under the impression that had we stayed up by more than 10 points (enough to stay up regardless) then our 10 point penalty would have been held over to next season. Surely this is the situation that Stockport are in? Or have I misunderstood the rules?

Although I admire your enthusiasm :smt041 if Mark Fry is doing his job properly then the moral of the people in Southampton will make no difference. He will accept the best deal for creditors. Sentiment (unfortunately) won't come into it as he will be entirely professional in what he does.

However there is no requirement for the administrator to be fair to fans emotions. Not saying I wouldn't like there to be but MLG is right. He wouldn't have to publish it if there were a deadline. As soon as a deadline is put in the public domain it makes it more dificult to quietly extend it. Fans donating money may allow for the posibility of extending if necessary. Not fair but if it helps Mr Fry do his job I'm sure he will do so.

And I was agreeing with you.

Good point IMO

You aren't wrong. With regard to the objectives of administration which I have put in bold in your post, these are in order of priority. i.e. If you can't achieve the first you try of the second etc. It is worth noting though Mr Fry is administrator of SLH. Rescuing the Company means saving Southampton Leisure Holdings Plc rather than SFC Limited or SFC itself. This isn't going to be possible Therefore he is obligated to look to achieve the second objective. achieve a better price for the company’s assets or otherwise realise their value more favourably for the creditors as a whole than would be likely if the company were wound up (without first being in administration); or

Does our friend work for Horwath Clark Whitehill LLP? If si he ma have been auditing Pwc. I think the have a fairly large office in Southampton....

Neither do I. The company is in administration. If all you are interested in is Jackson's farm or Staplewood make an offer for those. Mr Fry has no obligation to sell them all together as a single package. Buying and then discarding a football team (that it looks as though others are interested in too) just as a premium on the land seems a bit ott, especially given the currently low and falling property values.

I agree. If I had a number of interested parties and beleived that a njumber of them were dragging their feet I would (in most cases) set a deadline and tell them to get on with it. I wouldn't be that surprised if this turned out to be one potential bidder trying to manipulate others into showing their hands. Sometimes refered to as playing silly bugg3rs.

I would have thought it was as above with one other option: xxx & Lowe - Remains in force xxx & SFC - Remain in force, up to new owners if they want to tae action in the event of a breach xxx & SLH - Cease to be relevant after the plc is wound up. FWIW I doubt that the agreements are between xxx & Lowe personally. It wouldn't be that conventional and given that the solicitor that advised on the agreement was almost certainly engaged by either SLH of SFC it wouldn't be very logical.

Coming from a poster that I trust not to post b*llsh*t rumours this has got me excited. Damn it! Stop bl**dy raising my hopes.

Oh yes. My mistake it's fine in that case.

+1. Am shocked.

The cost of a peice of perspex is irrelevant. The fact that you consider it to be ok because you consider the cost to be low is more shocking to me. There is probably some cheap stuff knocking around in your front room. Does that make it ok for me to break in and trash it? How do "managerial decisions over the last few years" have anything to do with the acceptability of crime? I was shocked at the skate ***ts encoraging their kids to throw bricks when we played them a few years back at nottarf crap and I have the same reaction to you.