hutch

I think, Frank, that the answer lies somewhere in the secured v. unsecured thing. The £500,000 you mentioned is the amount offered to the unsecured creditors in the CVA. I think (but I could be wrong) that if the company is liquidated right now, the secured creditors would get first dibs at any cash, until they are paid up in full, (remember Chinny is secured for £18m) so the unsecured creditors would get nothing.

You should tell her. Maybe send her some flowers as well.

Not at lunchtime please, mate

The pp was reportedly just under £6.1m, and a chunk was set aside for Sacha - just over £1m I recall. I think the figure of around £3½m that was reported at the time was after PKF had set aside enough to pay their own arrears.

PKF fees are nine grand a day.

My thumb suck is they're spending about quarter of a million a month above ordinary income. That's roughly a hundred grand more than they can "afford" on player wages and a hundred and fifty grand on administrators fees more than a typical L1 executive board and support staff would cost them. They've got about three million left from that parachute payment, so they could go through the season if they wanted to. They have to go back to Court, I think, in February to have the admin extended, but that's not likely to be a problem. That could all change, of course, if Kanu won the lottery at his hearing.

Not necessarily. PST's bid is conditional on receiving a big lump of cash from the Council. That lump is conditional on PST being the only bid on the table. PST's entire focus for the past month or so has been to get the other bids removed. If they can't do that they, in reality, have no bid to offer. Surprisingly, it seems that Mr.Chainrai still holds al the aces. All 5 of them. And he's giving PKF a bit of a runaround. He will do what he wants, when he wants, to get his money back.

My guess is that it's Portpin who are being deliberately unhelpful until the ownership of the Miland 2004 land is sorted out with the other administrators. Then they will decide whether to be more compliant and carry on, or walk away and keep their stranglehold over the fortress.

The Country's got by without a good politician at the helm for the last 20 years, so that's not really a consideration any more.

In that case there isn't enough money in the world to make them competitive.

I think we should just leave things the way they are, and leave it up to Rupert Murdoch to decide who should be punished & who should not.

Not for me thanks, moosh. I prefer to 'ave a larf

I find Hall's 2-part article interesting, both in it's content and timing. I think he's on pretty solid ground with his "central allegation": However the detail is a bit iffy in places. Much speculation and supposition, a few outright errors and some ignoring of facts that might not fit well into the story. I'm not saying it's rubbish - I'm sure a lot of it is very close to the truth. Too close, in fact, to have been written by an outsider. My guess is that it is the work of somebody in a senior position in the Gaydamak camp rather than Portpin or Falcondrone. Interesting that the "inside info" appears to dry up after about March 2010. I'm with gemmel, in that I think overall it does more to exonerate Chainrai than condemn him. I don't think there's too much in there that will worry Chainrai's lawyers (no, I dont mean Mark Jacob). He comes across as a "conned" lender trying very hard, within the law, to get his money back. And I wasn't convinced by the article that Jacob was operating exclusively as Chainrai's puppet. Gotta prove the Al Faraj letters are indeed forgeries. Good luck there. And the "prank" call which wasn't really from Al Faraj at all, was it? Pretty good work overall, though. And brave man.

He's really gonna take the league by storm:

I heard their gate income has taken a big drop as fans have realised that if they just turn up at the player's entrance on matchday with a kit bag over their shoulder, and utter the secret password "I've just been signed on for this month, mate", they can get in for free.

Trying not to get into semantics, because a lot is speculation, but the important point I was trying to make, without criticising anybody else's interpretation of the available reliable information, was that the story that Chainrai gave 'Appy a budget of £4m a year, and then suddenly without warning, cut it to £1.5m, is complete bullsheet made up by 'Appy.

I don't think that's true, although 'Appy would like you to believe that it is. I don't think I've seen any evidence of Portpin giving either Birch or 'Appy a player wage budget at the start of the summer. At that time 'Appy was whingeing to anybody who would listen (Hi Neil) that nobody from Portpin would answer his calls or talk to him about his player budget for the coming season. So he made one up, based on items in the news about Birch's "target" to reduce the unsustainable wage bill, which was at that time around £12m a year. All Portpin said at the time was that after they took over the club "would live within it's means". If 'Appy had enough fingers, he could have worked out for himself that the "means" of a L1 club is an annual turnover of around £5m, so a TOTAL wage bill, @ 65%, of less than £3.5m. Taking off some to pay the new executives and management, backroom staff, matchday staff, non-first team squad players, etc, leaves less than £2.5m for the first team squad wages. At the time Chinny chipped in with his £1.5m budget comment, I saw that as a warning to Birch that every £££ he gave away in a compromise settlement was coming off next years squad budget.

Ian Holloway

Man Utd & Arsenal have been the top 2 consistent performers in the league over the past 20 years or so. They must be doing something right. Liverpool used to be part of that group, but have slipped out in the last few years. Can't think why.

You are both jointly responsible for the Party Wall. I assume the wall is getting damp, so it's in both your interests to get it sorted as quickly as possible.

Not sure I agree. Pretty much all of it has been available here as it happened, although, being more circumspect, most of our posters have rather posted links to other articles rather than repeat potentially dodgy allegations on here. The only new material that I didn't know relates to the earlier, pre-Pompey attempts by Azougy & Narkis to get their money back from Gaydamak in early 2009. And I hadn't seen the linked allegedly forged letter from Al Faraj to Storrie & Jacobs. If you had read all the articles on here, and followed all the links, then you knew the rest.

Absolutely, and something as important as this can't be left to the police or the judicial system. This needs the investigative big guns from the media.

Can't you download it for free if you've got uTorrent and an account on xspeeds.com?

Do keep up. Appy's constantly having to field calls from England selectors trying to tempt his precocious young talent away on international duty.

That answers Kraken's point above. Portpin said roughly the same thing buried in their PR guff last week. Birch's expensive temps will be out the door as soon as the purchase deal is done.