rallyboy

looks like we are heading for a day in court tomorrow and a sweating Storrie coming out celebrating a four week stay of execution or some equally disappointing result, oh well. And calling him a fat Rupert is about as bad as it gets! Well all this excitement has to go on a back burner for a few hours, I'm about to hop on a train to Wembley town, calling at St Marys Central!!

They have had ample opportunities to pay and also to sell, in January they made no effort to do either. There has been no sign of the company addressing debt issues, until the court date looms... They have also left it to the last 24 hours to negotiate - these are all self-created problems and I see no reason for the authorities to grant much at all. Unpaid wages, unpaid creditors, but taking on new staff? And yes it is personal, because we tried to get by with youth team players to reduce costs, our form suffered as a result and we were hit with a double whammy. Other clubs have cut costs and been relegated on the back of money issues, Portsmouth has just continued to trade illegally. Hang them high Mr Taxman.

That article says he is willing to make an offer, BUT doesn't make any mention of the taxman recieving one let alone accepting it. I thought Chanrai initially loaned £18.5M and then a wage bill payment which plus the interest (Palace were borrowing at 18%) must make his debt £25M already, meaning he would personally want at least £30M payback if he sold. With many other debts and costs the club is starting to get very expensive. If HMRC do accept a new payment plan from him, the Pompey debt would just increase making them less attractive to a buyer. They need donations not loans. Even with a payoff tomorrow I see no progress beyond postponing implosion for another few weeks.

it's taken a few of us 230 pages but I reckon a couple of you have just thrown a shaft of sunlight onto a good theory that might make sense of some of the madness....listen up and consider this as a purely fictional version of events that couldn't possibly be true.....concentrate.... The whole Chanrai legal case against the arms dealer was a sham supported by dodgy contracts agreed between the two. They created backdated paperwork that would lead the unsuspecting court to the obvious conclusion of awarding a massive payout against Gaydamak - the only scenario that could release money from those frozen accounts. Chanrai then whacked 'his' payout of those unfrozen funds, into a vehicle that Gaydamak knew he could utilise for further laundering, and to pay off agreed fees to his partner for the 'unfreezing' work. All they needed was a mystery figure at the helm taking the pressure as they quietly removed those funds from said company - enter arab answer to Lord Lucan stage left. And if anyone found out and tried to halt it? 'There's £500K, look the other way', or the buck stops at the top, and how can you charge an owner who doesn't exist? Chanrai makes a few quid, looks like a big businessman who has generously assisted the club, gets some shares in a Sky TV cash generator/laundering business, and Gaydamak regains access to a huge chunk of his money that otherwise would be out of his reach. And when the fun and games fizzle out they end up owning adjoining pieces of land for a development project. This of course is a ludicrous story borne out of watching too many Bond films and no one would believe it to be true, though it oddly ticks most boxes. Everyone's a winner. Well, nearly everyone.

Very funny Mr CrabLungs - you obviously have far too much time on your hands, but you are using it wisely! Storrie moans the media have 'had the knife in all season' - no Pete, they have always printed the league tables, it's nothing personal. Though they may be preparing a new template for use later this week.

well it could be an interesting week! I do hope we can finish off MKD and that Carlisle do the same to Leeds. It would be nice if Kenwyne Jones scored a last minute winner at Fratton. I do hope the taxman and the judge are impatient on Wednesday. It would be understandable if Avram chucked it all in Thursday morning. And a few of their players decided to go the free agent route that afternoon. And Ricky Lambert crashed in a 98th minute winner on saturday. Don't the weeks fly by when you're enjoying yourself.

more like - Pompey make up fairytale about potential buyer to try and fool the taxman into extending their club history beyond Wednesday. Try again Mr Storrie, you have misled everyone too many times for us to believe you now.

if Chanrai has really recouped the majority of his loan already then he is quids in and the ground will do him nicely, the only thing keeping them afloat is his need to protect his loan. The administrator could then be selling a championship club on minus 15pts, with no ground, and financial irregularities pending - which as Storyteller was saying would be a bargain..... Then again he insists they got a draw at Old Trafford, and luckily the rest of the results went for them too.

I think that is correct, the process started when they issued the petition, their activity since then should have been seriously restricted - but it hasn't been! Taking on new staff and missing further payments can't go down well with the court. the arms dealer's land isn't relevant to the winding up, it's a done deal and just a complication for a new owner with aspirations to blow £100M on redevelopment - though they might want to sweep for landmines if it's been used for storage. There isn't an access issue either as the stadium has a towbar at one end and apart from knocking a few horse brass off the walls, the whole thing can be hitched up and moved a bit. I guess we will discover on Wednesday how lucky that heather really is.

are they going to let potential new owners consider the Luton Town scenario before they look through the books or after?... Let's presume a good result for them at the court and creditors accepting restructured payments over the next two or three years. So all of the debt is sorted, but new running costs would have to be in the region of £5/6M a month to cover repayments, which would be - In the Champions League - break even? In the Prem - Unsustainable. In the Championship - Insane. Even at a squeeze these costs might only come down to £4M a month - and that's without buying players or any progress on stadium or training facility. They really need either Chanrai or Landmine boy to write off their debts to make the club viable - good luck with that one. The main players may have swapped seats but the figures still don't add up. They are trying to sell a business that even in the best case scenario appears to be losing money. And that's without the mention of financial irregularities - whoops, I mentioned it.

interesting slip by Jacobs on that South Today piece when he said that Gaydamak senior used to be the owner, then corrected himself. Whoops. And nice to see that someone has obviously read all the detail on this thread and then gone and put that proper report together, I hope the Prem and HMRC have viewed it and are now up to speed on the obvious criminality that has surrounded the business. If you want to know how Pompey fell apart there is only one thread to read. I think four Pompey stories in the Sun was enough yesterday - brothel, debts, Chav Botaeng and one other....oh yeah, another defeat. This is a golden era - and still it goes on!

let's try and cut through all the delaying spin and rumour and look at facts (and some guesses!). Chanrai has claimed the security of his loan today - and I would wager that he has no intention of paying anything else unless it buys him time to an even bigger payday, and that is months and another £20M investment away. He wants control of the club but not the debt responsibility that goes with that. Is his claim to the whole club legal? Possibly not if the later assets were secured after the petition was launched. Is a petty internal dispute over ownership a reason for the taxman to be lenient? No. Is it legal under the winding up order for him to assume control and deny responsibility for the debt? No. Will he pay it? No. Will he deliver a new owner by Wednesday? No. Will the taxman give him more time? Only if he demonstrates some ability or enthusiasm for paying them. Will he do that? No. Has anything changed today? It's become more complex and made it more unlikely that they can avoid the chop next week. Does the taxman care about anything other than payment? In a word, no. Have they changed deckchairs on the Titanic? Yes.

if Tony Soprano went round to my local pizza shop to collect debts, shot the bloke in the legs before chucking him out on the street I wouldn't think, 'mmm, new owner, that's the rosy future of the place secured'. 1.Chanrai needs to prove his legal claim to the whole set up. 2.He then needs to start clearing debts. 3.He also has to satisfy HMRC that he can clear their debt, by paying a significant sum next week. If he fails to do any of these then he will look not like an owner but a loan shark who just wants his money back as soon as possible. His priorities are obviously - his money, satisfying the other creditors (purely to make the club attractive), the welfare of the club - in that order. If we follow that line of vague ifs and buts, one could suggest that rather than securing their future, he may have just taken the first step in pulling the plug on Pompey.

if the arms dealer and Chanrai are in it together there isn't enough money to go round, if they are against each other Chanria has left himself exposed to a massive legal battle. how do we define 'seized' control? Has he taken the security (the ground, and if he can persuade the court that his later claim is valid, all of the assets) against his debt that they have defaulted on? Or passed a fit and proper person test and taken ownership of the club with the full approval of the Prem? He can't just stand up one day and declare himself the new owner. He is either the mother of all baillifs OR a new owner.

if Carlsberg did local rivals they would come to your place when ten points from safety and insolvent, in the very week that you book your Wembley tickets! - but let's not get ahead of ourselves...it's a long shot, they might be only eight points adrift by then.

those in charge seem to have given up even pretending to run a legal business - no attempt at clearing debt, delayed wages, one big sneeze and the whole farce will fall over. Someone needs to ask them if they are still trading - that could be the first question in court next week. Ridiculous and criminal. The thread covering the legal cases and convictions that MUST follow might even threaten the length of this one.....and yet they continue to bring in players who will never get paid, but could still relegate rivals who are not running their clubs illegally.

the fog is lifting and the plot is a little clearer. So they don't intend to pay off debt (didn't fool us on that one), they will go into admin (ditto), but the club and ground will be protected as one item, IF the latest agreement isn't thrown out by the winding up order. The only thing to decide will be the size of penalties for the offences that will be committed - there will be tax and football creditors unsatisfied, so no cva. For a Pompey fan who just wants survival, I think (!) this is good news, in fact it might make everyone happy because if they do survive and Chanrai actually wants a football club and not a leisure/industrial development, they will be starting next season with little chance of promotion from whatever division they are shuffled down to. Best scenario - Championship with minus 15? More likely - Championship with minus 30/League One with minus 10....which would be an interesting place to start a rebuild.

interesting confirmation from the council statement is that as suspected there is nothing left to secure loans against. This suggests that all of the club's current assets are now at the mercy of creditors. No more loans, no more significant income - I can't see how they will still be trading in 4-6 weeks, even with our generous fa cup fundraiser. (then again I can't believe they are still technically a going concern today!)

the natural thought is, someone will invest last minute and they will be saved, something will come up.... But let's look at the facts, we are in a new era of banking discipline and impatient taxmen - they need a new owner who is happy to risk maybe £150M on turning the club round, a man who doesn't want to buy Newcastle cheaper, and ideally they need him to complete in the next seven days! They have been hunting this madman for a year without success, people that rich don't get that rich by risking huge sums on lunatic schemes. A business proposition like that is only useful if you want to launder huge amounts of dirty money but the authorities are all over this club now, it so obviously isn't a real business anymore. And if it comes to post-admin - the complex web of debt, loans, and vague ownership, along with the asset-stripped structure are likely to leave a club without a cva or a ground, heavily penalised, and not worth even a cheap punt. The blue few paradise scenario of a fresh new vibrant club created the next day free of debt, is like most of what we have heard from the Fratton management clowns in the last six months, fantasy. Nothing has changed in six months - spin and rumour hasn't cleared a single debt. Cash was the only answer, and they still need lots of it, and now. And for the odd sensible Pompey poster on here, yes we would enjoy the highs as you did, but if Pardew had just put in an offer of £10M for a player I think most on here would be quietly horrified unless our owner announced he had put aside huge money and a longterm budget to move the club forward. As post-apocalypse fans I think we are more aware of wages and fees and I would rather lose some games than see our management team gamble the future of the club on some short term dreaming. Don't get me wrong, I won't be demanding that we buy poor players and pay low wages but it all needs to be sustainable and thankfully that appears to be the way we are operating. Meanwhile, as Pompey have refused to address their debts and made no effort to offload players they cannot afford to pay, we will be facing a team in the fa cup that has been criminally-assembled by a club that is clearly trading illegally, and as such brings the game into disrepute.

I thought it was bad that a company with a £75M turnover couldn't pay the £2M wages, I then thought it was ludicrous they couldn't pay the web company £2000. We now know they couldn't pay the match announcer £60, but tonight I have been told of a bloke who sold them goods for £35 and they didn't have enough to pay him! Any advance on the cost of one match ticket? Have we found the creditor on the end of the very long queue, or have they shafted someone for even less?... Meanwhile the loanee wages keep stacking up. They have given up on paying debts, it's just blatant theft now.

In the next 110mins they need to raise £25M. I don't think they are serious about selling players today to cover debt, the creditors must wonder why little is happening when they should be offloading 7/8 players for the wages at least. Are they hoping it all just goes away and they win a few games by retaining most of their illegally-assembled squad? It's a suicidal strategy in the last chance saloon - the taxman won't blink first and will nail them to a tree. And on the upcoming milestone for the thread, the peleton should wave the thread-starter to the front - so I await a historic and poetic post that may even inspire the book title when it is published.....

I hope their new signings like Pot Noodle and crisps, you can get them in bulk from the Eastleigh CashNCarry. Anyone at Fratton asked why they can afford to do lots of expensive things but paying ordinary people and local businesses seems beyond them?... The club's reputation is shot to bits, they look like a dirty club run by crooks. (in case anyone hadn't noticed!)

I thought the parachute payments were something like £9M x2? Either way, this future TV money and the ground are already security for existing loans? They can't pay £60 but they are still trading - WAKEY WAKEY PREMIER LEAGUE!!!! It's over, they have technically been in admin for four months but no one will admit it. But on a personal note, the longer they hang on the better, the debt is rising, the recovery less likely, but the slowest train crash in financal history cannot survive the upcoming court appearance, can it?

generally speaking, Prem footballers are simpletons who covet shiny tat - I can only assume their brains work in different ways to 'normal' people. There are exceptions, but there does seem to be a pattern of cheap neck tattooes, thick and easily-impressed women, cars they can't handle, oversized hats, poor judgement on drinking, appalling judgement on relationships and an inability to construct sentences. Chuck in £100K a week and we have created monsters. If Terry delivers on the pitch and behaves off it we will be fine, but as Cole discovered, your supporters will accept you when you are peforming but boy will they turn on you the first time you fail. So, chavvy scum! - with apologies to the 10% - meaning the likes of David James if we put rivalries aside, Ryan Giggs, and anyone else who managed to complete secondary school. And putting aside Ferguson's many obvious character defects, he has a good record with discipline and keeping players feet on the ground, as a pensioner he must look at the likes of Terry and want to give him national service.

Maradona is going to go ape when he sees a convicted fraudster dismantling his squad, though of course it's just paving the way to bring in all those Galacticos. Man City v Pompey at the weekend is set to be the first of many battles between the two newest richest clubs in Europe, as Utd fade, Pompey will take their place, and no doubt billionaire mover and shaker Al Fahim will be selling ice creams in the front row again. Any news on 2018 world cup final tickets in the harbour stadium yet, I tried to look on their website but there were obviously too many people trying to buy champions league hospitality or U2 tickets.