Charles Bannerman

Yeh… whatever rocks your boat. If you want to make a big song and dance over the fact that I might better have included the words “clubs like”…. on you go.

I’ve now read the Courier’s report on this meeting and I see the Chairman quoted as saying “We bought the ground around us. We didn’t own the ground until last year.” This raises one or two questions for me. Precisely which “ground” is being referred to here? The stadium site - initially 9.03 acres but soon extended to 12.88 - was leased for 99 years in 1994 from the Inverness Common Good Fund who owned the land. This comprised the area of the stadium itself and the surrounding car parks. So is it all or part of this area that the Chairman is saying has been purchased from the CGF by the club? Or is it further land beyond the perimeter? And of particular interest here at this time of financial crisis is - where did the money come from? I imagine that another quote from the Chairman may also attract attention - “Caley Thistle should be a commercial property company with a football club hanging off it.” Thoughts, anyone?

I also am unclear about what the objectives of this scheme are. Is the aim to raise money by share purchase to help with running costs, or is it to achieve significant shareholding in the hope of having a fan director on the board? Or a bit of both? In the case of the former, I fear that any cash input raised from fans would barely scratch the surface given the scale of recent losses - £16,000 a week according to the most recently available figures and the word on the street has been that the figures for 2022-23, which have to be revealed by the end of next month, may sit at average weekly losses of around £12K, although I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised on that one. As for getting a supporter on the board, I haven’t had time to look at the articles of association, but I suspect that there may be two possible routes - election at the AGM (which should happen before late July) to fill any vacancy, or cooption by the current board. I don’t think straightforward shareholding is enough. I also wonder if football sometimes loses sight of what a company’s board is meant to be. The orthodox answer is a collection of what the shareholders consider to be the best available group to run the company. But since football operates via the economics of the madhouse, boards tend here to have a significant presence of people who have been prepared to cover a club’s fundamental losses which are built up as a result of persistently paying players more than the market will stand. We therefore encounter the question - are football directors there for their skills in running companies or is their primary role simply as cash cows? The Chairman with the minimum £250 shareholding that Scotty mentioned will be Ken Mackie who, as I understood it, was a Tulloch appointee at a time when Tulloch’s £5 million injection was in full flow, but David Sutherland himself wanted to stand down. Ken, a chartered accountant, was one of the best chairmen, if not the very best that the club has had and, for instance, it was largely due to him that the club negotiated the minefield designed to keep ICT out of the SPL in 2004.

The company currently has £4.9 million issued shares so it depends what percentage of that would be needed for it to be thought fit for a supporters’ director to be appointed. On that basis, I think the 10% Supporters’ Trust entitlement would put it in third place behind the approx 20% if you aggregate the holdings of the Muirfield Mills group and the 14.9% of the Community Trust, with the likes of Alan Savage/Orion and the Sutherland interest probably next in line along with the McGilvrays. However I don’t think there’s a specified number of shares. As far as I know, board composition is matter force current board and shareholders, in accordance with whatever it says on the Articles of Association.

According to what Scot Gardiner told the September Football Memories meeting, it was his idea to approach Duncan Ferguson and it was he who persuaded Duncan Ferguson to apply. I follow separately that, after the interviews, Scot Gardiner and the Chairman voted for DF and Grassa voted for Dougie Imrie.

That’s a masterful appraisal of the club’s status from Scotty there, although I do also agree with Johndo’s point that Duncan has been hamstrung by a very low budget. In that regard, I don’t think we know how good a job Duncan is capable of in the same way as we don’t know how good a dentist is if all they have to work with are hammer and chisel. Fundamentally, we have no way of finding out just how desperately low the player budget is and therefore whether we are having to rely on players who would struggle to get a full time contract anywhere else and loanees whose parent clubs have possibly been quite glad to get rid of them. Note that I am simply saying we don’t know here, because we have no way of even guessing how much is being spent on the squad - partly because the latest available accounts reflect a period that ended almost two years ago and also that they are not obliged to show earnings or expenditure, but simply the profit/loss situation (most recently a loss of £835K). All we therefore know is that we have a squad that isn’t performing but we don’t know whether we are simply getting what we have paid for and that neither Dodds nor Ferguson could be expected to make bricks without straw. Moving on to Scotty’s crystal clear appraisal of the club’s status, both historical and current, we need to come to terms with the fact that the club has been bailed out by well wishers for years now. For instance 2018/19 alone needed £1 million in new shares - ie financial gifts - and since then hands regularly been put into pockets. What makes this all the more egregious is that TWO YEARS of trying to raise cash by non-football means have been utterly wasted since one bright idea went bust and the other has hit serious trouble which was apparently not foreseen. Scotty also makes the point that the club’s local reputation has been substantially trashed as a result of these twin disasters. I would add that I felt distinctly ashamed at the last AGM when I pressed the top table on the failure of the Concert Company and received the almost triumphant reply that the football club had extracted money for stadium hire from the concert company BEFORE it went bust, leaving several local traders out of pocket. Add that to the bellicose and arguably coercive pronouncements emanating from the club during the recent planning process and I really do worry about local public perception of this club and hence willingness to support it should it run into even more serious trouble. As a veteran of the crisis of 1999-2000 when Tullochs had to intervene to spirit away £2.3 million of debt and before that of a multitude of existential cliffhangers during the merger, I am still finding it difficult to see how the club can escape from this one, especially in a local atmosphere where a body that should enjoy widespread esteem has got itself into a position where it is actively disliked in many quarters.

It should maybe be added that Duncan Ferguson must be working on a rock bottom budget and up here it does seem that clubs have to pay players a premium for geographical reasons recruiting at a decent standard must be very difficult. Was anyone else at the September meeting of the Football Memories group where Scot Gardiner took the floor and detailed how he personally had recruited Duncan? I understand that the appointment was confirmed after Scot Gardiner and the Chairman voted for Duncan and Grassa voted for Dougie Imrie.

One of the problems of being a “Small Company” is that the accounts aren’t very detailed. In fact when they eventually materialised last year, I don’t recollect any statement of turnover so we don’t really know, year on year, what’s happening with earnings. We also don’t know what the losses are as a percentage of turnover so we just have to speculate as to what the relative magnitude of that £835K loss was.

I agree with a certain amount of what you say but there are other criticisms that were also made of the previous board and also of boards before that, and indeed are made by football fans throughout the game. The basic truth is that there is no obligation on anyone to put themselves in the firing line and spend their personal funds running a fundamentally non-viable business using a fundamentally non-viable business model - which is common throughout the game. It’s been clear from the start that there isn’t enough demand, neither actual nor (probably) potential, for a product involving around 30 full time front line employees with several more in backup roles, to make that business anything other than regularly loss making. Over time, something in the ballpark of £10 million of other people’s money has gone into keeping this business going and it always runs into the same problem because of its fundamentally loss making nature. Far too often in football there seems to be this expectation that it’s someone else’s responsibility to fund this loss making process and failure then leads to calls for the removal of those who have used their own money to try and their replacement by others prepared to expose themselves to the same routine.

And if you did that - cast aside people who have been bailing out a fundamentally loss making position with their own money for years - who would you expect to take over the running of the club and to cover its ongoing financial shortcomings, knowing that this could happen to them as well? The community doesn’t owe football a living - especially if football chooses to live beyond its means and expects other people to pick up the tab for that.

Has anyone chanting for the Board to be sacked managed to work out how much in loans would be recalled for immediate repayment as a result?

It would probably sink into the deep mud that was clearly afflicting the penalty spot there yesterday morning.

The original decision was taken by the South Planning Committee comprising councillors from south of the Kessock Bridge. Some of these failed to attend the site visit so were disqualified, some declared an interest and it’s said some couldn’t be @rsed, leaving 5 as against a quorum of 3. The decision was then referred to the full council, also including members from 100+ miles away from Inverness and that attracted an attendance of 56, with no apparent concern about declaring interests or not having done a site visit.

In 1995 Inverness District Council voted for a £900,000 grant to the club, of existential significance, to make the stadium project viable. On the strength of that, construction contracts were let - and then a cabal of councillors and council officials managed to find a technicality which they used to create a rearguard action against payment. The eventual outcome of a chaotic scenario was that, under threat of legal action, the cash was paid from the Common Good Fund. Fast forward to 2024 and Highland Council’s planning process made a decision to allow a battery farm, again of existential significance, worth £3.4 million to the club, but now another huge spanner has been thrown in these works in the form of another rearguard action by councillors (and possibly council officials as well) who don’t like this decision and are again intent on reversing it amid rumblings of legal action. Our local councils don’t seem to learn much from previous episodes of chaos that they’ve created.

I think what the breakdown shows is that the ownership of the club is extremely diffuse, with no single group holding an especially large holding. The biggest is clearly the Muirfield Mills syndicate where a block of around half a dozen people own around 900K shares but even that is less than 20%, with the Trust block coming in at less than 15% and the Savage, McGilvray and Sutherland holdings all less than 10%. I’m also not sure what the personal relations are like among these biggest players. It’s also worth noting that those involved are almost all over 70 years old and may not be in a position or have the inclination to do much.

Thanks for doing that very interesting leg work at Companies House, hislop. It’s also possible to group the holdings you list into the various “interest groups” that have been involved with the club over the last 25 years or so. I believe the still quite fragmented breakdown is as follows - David Sutherland, family and Dornoch Investments - 300,250. McGilvray Family - 466,983. (Includes some more of what Sandy Catto donated to the Hospice and which I believe Sandy originally bought from Ian Fraser who invested over £300K in the 1996 share issue) Alan Savage/Orion - 466,506 (See note above) Muirfield Mills - 873,500 (I believe that at least one other MM investment of less than £50K would take this above 900,000.) ICT Charitable Trust - 729,500. This is Tulloch’s holding which was donated to the Trust. The Thistle FC and the Caledonian FC blocks are “A” shares while the others are ordinary shares. I’m not sure what the voting arrangements are there or, if they have voting rights, who would exercise these. EDIT - while I was writing, Highland Exile made a post that reminded me of the A share arrangement. Thanks HE!) Note that David Cameron, Roddy Ross and Gordon Munro also have £50K+ Ordinary holdings and will also doubtless have internal political alignments. Many of these shares were bought to keep the wolf from the door - most notably the large Muirfield Mills conglomerate which is money that’s long gone covering losses. I’m also not sure how much is outstanding in loans that may have been made, but with no shares in return, and are still outstanding.

Unfortunately, in many respects this IS the backup plan…. after the collapse of the Concert Company.

Another thought. What if the Scottish Government overrides today’s decision and gives the scheme the go ahead…. but so much fear and alarm has by now been spread by local residents that house prices in the surrounding area take a nosedive?

As was the massive area at Holm Mills, now circumscribed by the West Link…. and where hundreds of houses are now being built. It would have been an ideal site for a public park.

I think that the club’s prospects of acceptance were on a dicky wicket once safety issues came into the equation. It’s easy to argue between the loss of 2% of a large green area by taking the Inner Moray Firth plan as the letter of the law on the one hand, and on the other a green initiative that will yield £125K per annum for the Council and hugely help one of Inverness’s highest profile organisations. However Elfin Safety seems to trump everything. Also, it’s easy for people in our position to highlight the benefit to the club but the ordinary person on the street or councillor in the chamber often has no partisan interest and could validly argue (Devil’s Advocate kite alert!) that the self-inflicted financial failings of a football club, notwithstanding its good PR etc for Inverness, cannot be taken into consideration in the course of deciding a planning application.

Unfortunately this is the second non-football money making project that has been floated as a panacea, with no potential pitfalls initially flagged up…. until they suddenly emerged from left field. There was no indication that the Concert Company could encounter any difficulties…. until it went bust at great cost to the club’s local reputation. And now there’s the Battery Farm that suddenly ran into planning difficulties and we are where we are now. One of my concerns is that very little was revealed about the BF until the club meeting held the other week in response to the sudden public emergence of planning issues. Now that we know what the planning issues were - and irrespective of anyone’s viewpoint on them - was it not clear from the start that this was a project that could attract planning concerns, so at least came with some uncertainties? And if so why were we told so little about this project until a very late stage? So now… around two years on from the birth of the Concert Company… the club’s financial security continues to proceed ever deeper into a black hole.

They appeared also to be aware that there were potentially rich pickings from a large crowd at the Half Marathon and were booking people there - including, apparently, in the Archive Centre car park.

Is an English translation of this available? I’ve lost my Gibberish - English Dictionary.

For another day indeed - but it’s still one that needs to be had at some point.

I think that the club also needs to remember that this debate/campaign is being held in a very public arena, so overly aggressive communications with Councillors are also being seen by the whole community, and this is bound also to influence the perception of the club by that public. Here we also have to consider that public perception of ICT took a considerable knock after the collapse of the concert company and I fear that further damage could be done here. It’s unfortunate that the dire finances also exclude the employment of some advice on PR.