Latest on administration - Updated See Post #109

An ST has no real power anyway. The Swansea City Trust owns 20% of the club,yet still weren't consulted about the appointment of their new manager.
If,as you say Sluffy,the ST want ownershio of the club,then I'd say they were living in cloud cuckoo land.
It's not going to happen,and I think they know it.

But my distrust of Anderson stands.

Anderson is in it to make money for himself - but isn't that the same for everyone?

If he does it legally, then why shouldn't he?

There's a whole history of former Wanderers owners and directors who've done very well thank you, out of the club - are they any better or worse than Anderson?

Holdsworth appears to have done alright out of the club already without putting any money of his own into it - is he any better than Anderson?

If Anderson leaves us in a better place than where he found us is that so bad of him?

If he did exactly that plus took out a few million for himself, does that make him a better person or a worse one than the previous owner Eddie Davies?

I don't get this 'distrust' thing, this 'sweaty' Ken business.

He's here to make money, otherwise he wouldn't be here at all.

There was no one else willing to take a punt on a club after the way Davies had left it.

Do we honestly think those in charge of the ST are all saints?

Maybe you should check out some of their business dealings - but you and many other seem to be 100% behind them, without finding out how better they are (or not!) as an alternative to Anderson.

Anderson managed to get the ball to his side of the court, I can't see how anyone can begrudge him being given the chance to play it.

If he makes money out of making BWFC better, then fair play to him I say.

y2johnny wrote:It seems a lot are now turning on KA and i dont see why.  

If deano hasnt got the cash to inject into the club and KA has then why should KA fund deano and him retain his 40%.

Imo KA is keeping his end of the bargain and DH is finding it a struggle to keep his.  KA has said he will pay his own way but if DH doesnt pay his then they will go into admin as soon as next month.

KA can fund the shortfall until the end of the season from what he has without investment but will also seek further investment which, again, imo, is a good thing.

Even if he does sell at the end of the season and makes himself a wedge, who cares.  Hes a businessman and football is now big business.

KA is making all the right noises afaic, and the ST and other puppets are just using all this as an excuse to cast aspersions, doubt and try to turn the tide of positive feeling around.

The ST can fuck off

The bottom line is what has been made abundantly clear is that KA has the balls and know how to run a football club and Holdsworth doesn't, whilst people have referred to this as a public execution of Holdsworth in regards to the ongoing running of a club I'd rather have the executioner running the club because it is a very cut throat business and you need someone with the balls to make the tough decisions and KA has shown he is able to do that.
The fact he is in it to make money is a good thing because he isn't going to be able to do that unless we are successful.
The fact that Holdsworth borrowed £5m to get on board, a million of which was swallowed up on fees etc means he hasn't got a pot to piss in so how the hell was he going to meet the £800k a month we were losing, no wonder the business plan hasn't been submitted yet.
The fans need to get behind KA because whether he is in it for the longer term or looking to build us to sell us, we need him to be successful.

Sluffy wrote:

wanderlust wrote:So from Deano's perspective, he put up £5 million of which a mill went to pay "fees" and when it was realised we would be well short, KA asked Deano to put up half of the amount required to retain shares at the current level but he hasn't got it.

...and from Anderson's perspective, his partner came up a £1 million short (which had to be found) and has no money to meet his half of the ongoing monthly deficit of £850,000 - yet presumably still wanted a half share in the business.

Whilst the £5 million Deano 'put up' is set against assets of the club until it is repaid!

So what's the point are you making Lusty because I can't see it?

The point I'm making is that they f***** up the business plan  either by failing to identify a £million of "fees" in the expenditure side or by including a £million of income that was never going to be received. And that's if the deficit is only the £million that Deano was short by - I suspect it's a lot more.
Either way it's poor especially if the shortfall came as any kind of surprise. 

Poor communication all round and no contingency arrangements appear to be contributory factors, but that's no excuse IMO.

I keep coming back to Eddie Davies' role in all this.

Supposedly he only sold to Sports Shield because they demonstrated that they had the funds to safeguard the club's future and Eddie being a saint, was only prepared to entertain "serious bidders" who could do this.

So how the fuck is approaching Eddie Davies and saying: "Listen, if you sell me the club, even though I've no money myself, nor do I have any coming through my specially created investment company, I plan to borrow £5m against the ground at a ridiculously high rate of interest and hope for the best" demonstrating that he had a proper plan?

This was never going to work and Eddie Davies must have known that but all he was arsed about was getting the best deal for him personally and bollocks to what happens to BWFC.

Is there anybody out there who still thinks he's a decent guy?

Even with all the doubts, I think KA is the one we need to support. He may be ruthless, and looking out for the club merely to look out for himself, but the important thing is that we have survived the worst nightmare of almost any club, especially as people are still coming out of the woodwork, claiming even more 'fees'.
The bottom line is that we are still here, and our chances of surviving are getting better all the time.

...and while I'm having a rant, there's still a big part of me that thinks that Eddie Davies was behind Sports Shield all along.

Is it inconceivable that he got someone to approach Holdsworth and suggest that he put a bid in for the club?

It makes sense (to me at least) for the following reasons:

Gartside would obviously have known how to get hold of DH because of his history at Bolton.

When DH's name initially cropped up, everybody went: "That's a bit random!"

His company only got formed after it became well known that ED was selling.

Nobody else got a look in all through the time the club was up for sale (remember Stelios' comments?) and it always felt like DH would take over at some point, despite his obvious shortcomings and lack of finance.

The Sports Shield website is a graveyard, almost as if it was specially created to supplement the bid to buy the club and not a lot else. (There's absolutely nothing else about SS anywhere on the web and if it was a going concern as a finance company, there would be.)

Holdsworth hasn't come out and said anything much in the press. Ever. At all.
Almost as if he's been told to keep his trap shut.

During the final throes of the sale, Eddie Davies managed to keep flogging bits off and incorporating more and more clauses which would benefit him personally - Why would you put up with that if you were investing your own money to buy something? Very odd behaviour, as again, DH seemed only too happy to oblige.

So there you go......the conspiracy theory is complete: Not only was ED behind the setting up of the Supporters Trust, he also engineered SS's bid to buy the club.

It feels very much to me as though ED wanted a buyer he could completely control and manipulate and I think DH was vain and stupid enough to fall for it.

And, for once, I'm not joking.

I agree with you, Breaders. And Eddie is still in for his £15 Million. Though he has gone a bit quiet I expect he'll pop up when we get into the championship.

I said something similar at the time.

I never thought Davies was the only one who had money interests in the club and I wondered if Sport Shield fronted by an ex-player (someone known by everyone and probably thought to do what he was told) was simply a vehicle to transfer ownership 'legally' away from Davies to them with Holdsworth just being the puppet front guy.

It was clear that Davies wanted Sport Shield to have ownership by driving off anyone else allegedly interested in buying, with his long drawn out behaviour in selling and the way SS stuck like glue all the way through to buy the club - which let us not forget was running at a huge loss and would continue to do so for the best part of two more years due to the massive player contract commitments.

Add into the mix that SS was created 'just in time' to be on the scene (the same for the ST who surprise, surprise became SS only competition when Birch asked them to seek Preferred Bidder status) and that there was no known capital behind it other than Holdsworth house.

It all seemed rather contrived to me.

To this day I can't think how anyone could make money from the club without selling assets - which if the Blumarble loan is defaulted, will be exactly what will happen.

Yes I know owning a 'debt' is good if you want to off-set the tax loss on to your other businesses but seeing Holdsworth and Anderson haven't got any other significant business in this country, then how could they find this tax incentive any use to them?

I still can't get my head around the whole thing.

Davies could simply have sold everything for himself, flog the club for peanuts and walked off - if he only wanted money - so why do this dance with Holdsworth and SS.

Why did Holdsworth with no money want to buy a club losing £18 million a year so badly?

Why did SS and the ST spring up overnight, both with nothing substantial behind them and end up plating major roles in this soap opera, even though neither can bring any money to the table?

What chance has Anderson seen to make a profit - even if he played Holdsworth to gain control of the club it is still losing money and cannot be an attractive buy to anyone else as it stands (unless they are asset stripers - and if they are the assets are getting less and less by the day to keep the club running).

I simply don't get what is going on or why.

I still think the club will survive though - not one of all the clubs has fallen out of the league in the last 25 years and I can't see that changing now!

What I find difficult to understand is that clubs have been forced into administration over next to nothing in the past and yet somehow we haven't despite sailing very close to the wind.
As I understand it, our trading activities are being closely monitored by HMRC and the FA under the terms of the court settlement so what kind of oversight are they providing when we continued to sign players earlier in the year but have a funding shortage now? How was this allowed to happen?
Not sure what's really going on but something definitely is and the lack of information coming out of the club is very reminiscent of the Gartside era.

Perhaps Ken can 'divert' some money into our personal account.

This is turning into Drexit!