Charles Bannerman

I must say that my attitude to "glory hunters" has softened a bit. Even as recently as the 2015 Cup Final, I had a bit of an ambivalent attitude to the unprecedented presence of around 15,000 in the Inverness end - glad to see that level of backing for the club, but also a bit resentful at people turning up only for this extra helping of self-gratification. Now, I tend more to believe that everyone is free to buy into attending matches at whatever level their interest determines. With ICT there will maybe be a few dozen who attend every game, home and away; a few hundred who never miss a home game; a couple of thousand season ticket holders who attend most home games; a few thousand attending half a dozen or more games.... up to 15,000 for a Scottish Cup final. Nobody in a "more frequent" category really has the right to play the Self Righteous card and criticise less frequent attenders. Then there's the large majority of the population of Inverness who have no interest at all in watching ICT, many, possibly even most, of these with no interest in football at all. Where the final of a national cup for lower league sides (that's a definition, not a dismissive term) comes on that spectrum remains to be seen.

Caleyboy, I sometimes wonder if you have more agendas than an entire volume of Highland Council Minutes??

I'm not sure that the numbers totally support that conspiracy theory, given that the Muirfield Mills interest alone already outnumbers the Mcgil/Savco holding by about 3:2. But even if this were the case, DFS now has about 300,000 shares - approx 8% (I'm not rigorously checking numbers at this time of night) while MM control about 1.3M (ballpark 35%) and Mcgil/Savco has around 900,000 (knocking on 25%). Then, in a pretty splintered situation, you have the Supporters' Society we're not sure if the club actually has or not, holding (or perhaps not holding?) 10% of voting rights - more than DFS who is now around the 6th biggest shareholder. However that 10%, the 5th biggest clout, is in a state of total uncertainty. On the other hand if it's felt that the club would be better off without that £250K.......

Don't worry about the indirect answer, Huisdean, because you raise a very valid issue.

Ironically enough, Balmacara (the "new Balmacara", I think) was the most playable pitch in shinty last Saturday and hosted the only game that went ahead.

A further straight question - if you were on the current board, what would your attitude have been to accepting the £250,000 personal donation from "the builder" which is part of the £450,000 received in recent months to keep the club afloat?

Straight question - what would your alternative strategy have been to raise the £6M of other people's money that's been needed to get the club to where it's been over the last 25 years.

I should perhaps instead have said - this HAS ALREADY DEVELOPED into the mother of all fixtures backlogs!

This could be developing into the mother of all fixtures backlogs!

Apologies, OCG, I am probably a victim of my own attempt not to be too abrasive. A touch of the Sir Humphrys, perhaps. Essentially what I'm saying is that I wish some people would accept that, thanks to pretty good governance, this club has led a charmed life for years. It's therefore not all that helpful trying to apportion blame when the realities of a fundamentally loss-making operation can no longer be kept at bay. I would be even more reluctant to press the nuclear button with the suggestion that if people want a superior product then they should be prepared to pay more for it (as happens in any other line of business) instead of constantly looking round for other people to subsidise their activities.

Good question. Some folks don't seem to understand that the club's most notable feature over time is what it has done in the face of adverse circumstances. However the most prominent comments seem to come when things depart from the charmed life that largely good governance has created because something short of perfection has disrupted this otherwise privileged existence. Most complaints seem to arise when a relatively rare error has meant that a fundamentally loss making lifestyle can no longer be cobbled together.

No, I'm simply putting your CTO comments - current and historical - into a realistic context. This in particular may help forum users, especially more recently joined ones, to evaluate them - which I think is very appropriate and necessary. So, to provide a little more detail than in my previous post.... for an extended period on here some years ago, you waged a constant campaign of criticism and undermining of the stewardship of this club, prominent within which was the constant highlighting of any and every difficulty - real and imaginary - of which you could conceive. Then, by a process which has never been entirely clear and despite your having seriously antagonised those in charge at the time, you suddenly became part of the "establishment" as a "volunteer". Equally suddenly, more or less overnight indeed, the tone of your CTO posts switched from arch-antagonist to those of an arch-apologist for an administration which could suddenly do no wrong. In consequence, some would argue that there was a great deal of "credibility" indeed in the phrase "e*se-licking happy clapper", which was IHE's penetrating observation on this new status. Alongside this ran considerable uncertainty, reflecting a potential conflict of interest, as to whether some "CaleyD" posts were personal observations or being offered in your capacity as a club functionary on behalf of the club. Meanwhile, and coinciding remarkably with you ceasing to hold any position within the club, the "worm has turned" again, the happy clapping has stopped and board members once more have to use toilet paper in considerable quantities. This is a process which is more than evident from the stark contrast between your more recent, suddenly once again negative posts, and your earlier, persistent assurances that the set-up which led to over-resourced relegation and financial crisis, was infallible. I trust this puts into useful context a wide variety of "CaleyD" posts over an extended period of time.

Oh well, Scarlet, as long as you are content to reconcile that with the historical sequence of:- a constant tide of condemnation prior to an apparent visit to Damascus, upon which Inverness Caledonian Thistle suddenly achieved a period of administrative perfection up to and including over-resourced relegation.... before reverting to consistent mismanagement on more recent regime change.

What I am saying is that more or less every year things applying to it will drop off the ends of the accounts into the next year, so a lot of these factors are self-cancelling in whole or in part. The £250 a week was quoted by the manager at the AGM in respect of, I think, Coll Donaldson. We are, of course, talking about first team wages here. The rest are a fraction and we don't want to muddy the water. We do seem to be making an incredible meal of the fairly obvious - that the new board have come in, realised the cash that had been splashed in the past (and not to any great effect) and are doing their best to reduce expenditure as well as increase earned revenue streams. This would also appear to be a reasonable approximation to what Kingsmills has also been saying, although he is free to contradict me if it's not. As an aside, I wonder what a complete outsider would make of a chronological list of all your CTO posts which come to some judgement on how well the club's affairs are being run at any particular time?

It also looks as if Caley D may have reverted to his previous status following his "e*se-licking happy clapper" period.

I don't think it really matters when a rent write-off is agreed. It's surely when it's actually written off that it disappears from the accounts and this process is only being finalised now. Items "missing" the accounts deadline is an annual factor, so these 2016-17 accounts may well also have benefited from something similar at the start of the accounting period. In terms of cost cutting, the most excessive wages have been steadily been getting removed from the player pool and, as we were told at the AGM, wages have dropped to as little as £250 a week. Also, if all that much has been bounced forward to 2017-18, then that will presumably reduce the need for whatever subsidy will be required in the current season - albeit a season of reduced Championship income streams. I suspect that what we are again effectively talking about here is that the inner Moray Firth isn't capable of sustaining two upper league football clubs and hence two player pools being paid far more than can sensibly be justified in relation to their ability to generate earned income.

Scarlet - sorry if I have to appear nitpicking, but I have to understand exactly what you mean by your first sentence, including the unfortunate oxymoron "then current debt". I suspect you mean the recent £300k + dished out to last season's Premiership clubs as a result of Celtic's progress in Europe (now there's another oxymoron for you ) rather than the £373,000 of European Objective 1 money given towards the stadium away back in the mid 90s. As far as I can see there has not for some years been any significant debt at all for a variety of reasons, prominent among which being that there's no significant asset to secure it against. Until recently, the standard financial M.O. has been to drift from year to year in the hope that windfalls will keep the books pretty well balanced despite increasingly unrealistic payments to players. This came spectacularly unstuck to the extent of £422,000 in 2016-17. This was a fair slice of the reason for going to sympathetic individuals and asking for donations totalling £450,000 in exchange for 450,000 shares. It's pretty clear that the current board's strategy is to reduce spending considerably and to increase earned income to make the books balance in more realistic sense than before. This would reduce the dependence on unpredictable windfalls and presumably on having to put round the hat to benevolent individuals as well. As for club shares, the entire shareholding, now around £3.9M, is effectively a huge donation with no return expected by way of dividend (not a chance !) or meaningful resale. In terms of significant resales, back in around 2001 the late Ian Fraser sold over 300,000 shares to Sandy Catto at what is believed to be no more than 50p each. These were among the 500k+ shares that the Catto family later donated to the Hospice and which were subsequently sold (at an unknown price per share although this may emerge in the next Hospice accounts) to the McGilvrays and Alan Savage. This last transaction, in terms of shares numbers, not in cash terms, can be seen by changes in the latest Confirmation Statement.

That's my reading of it as well. The 28th February confirmation statement makes somewhat different reading from the one 12 months previously. And I'm sure these conspiracy theories will continue to flow.

Caman, please accept my apologies in advance if the top line of your statement is intended to be taken at face value as opposed to the irony which I have interpreted. But, in the latter event, it's you who needs to get real because that would betray little concept of the realities and demands of upper level competitive sport. After 90 minutes of football, or indeed after most sporting activities, even those of short duration, the need for recovery must take a high priority and needs to be managed very carefully. By the time you get to the end of a 40+ week season even playing once a week, the issue of cumulative fatigue is a consideration and concern, which is why adding in this that and another into some players' schedules is a worry. When you go to extended periods of playing competitively twice a week then that cumulative fatigue is an hugely bigger concern - and that's before you even start to think about injury risk and management. What we're talking about here is a bit more than kick and rush at the Bught in the the Welfare League before going back to the Gelluns for a pint.

OK... so the mystery and the astonishment deepen. I now come to realise that this is a LIMITED COMPANY that has failed to hold a General Meeting of its members for a considerable time and is being run by a self-appointed board who have been reluctant even to identify themselves and say they don't want to call a General Meeting because they are speculating that not enough people might turn up. Has any legal advice been taken about how well this scenario conforms with Company Law and what the possible implications may be? This actually sounds very serious indeed.

I've heard that suggested before but if so, how did the relatively recent creation of CJT get a hold of it? And even if that was the case, there must be something the club cab do to ensure that a supporters' group has a 10% voting right.

It strikes me that the whole thing has been allowed to get into such an irretrievable mess that the only way forward is to start again from scratch and reconstitute the society. Nobody seems even to know who the membership are nor which set of rules the thing is operating under. Indeed as I have been writing, Caley D has posted suggesting that some change with respect to the rules took place on January 8th of this year. How could this be the case if the Society hasn't, as I understand it, held a General Meeting since 2015? Meanwhile a group of six calling itself "The Board" seems in the interim to have appointed itself and, having only reluctantly revealed who the individuals are, appears to be avoiding situations where its status could be challenged such as a General Meeting, which is long, long overdue. Look, folks, this has all the signs of an irredeemable shambles, the upshot of which is that the football club continues to have a completely dysfunctional supporters' organisation at a time when it never had greater need of an active one. Meanwhile the very title "Caley Jags Together" simply acquires a more and more ironic reek! Any sense of togetherness is long gone. The best way forward might be for a completely new body to be formed with a properly constituted board elected by a properly identified membership and operating under properly defined rules... and with a completely fresh title. Then a General Meeting of CJT needs to be called with two items of business on the agenda. 1) To invest all CJT's rights and assets in the newly constituted body and 2) To wind up CJT. Before you dismiss this as fanciful, please remember that this is, in effect, how this football club came into being in 1994.

This is complete nonsense. As Davie says, the holding of a General Meeting isn't something that can be rejected by a self-appointed body, arguably motivated by self interest/preservation, simply based on convenient speculation that enough people MIGHT not turn up. It's a constitutional necessity for goodness sake and, according to Davie's post, apparently a legal one as well! What is being suggested is, incredibly, that a self-appointed body should be allowed to continue to operate by way of deliberately withholding the members' right to elect a constitutional one. What decides the validity of a General Meeting is whether a quorum turns up, not claims from the members of a self-appointed body that this potential challenge to their current status is a waste of time. If, at such a meeting, it did emerge that "nobody" was "prepared to take on the roles required", then if the 10% voting power was the absolute priority that has been stated, there are ways and means of preserving it. My first thought would be pre-specified agenda item for a constitutional amendment to allow trusteeship of the 10% vote to be invested in a small group appointed by the meeting. My interest in this CJT issue was sparked several months ago by the ongoing lapse in CJT's important activities as a supporters' organisation. Unfortunately subsequent events - or lack of them - have caused my previously neutral viewpoint to evolve into something rather different. I now find myself completely dismayed at what looks like an ongoing strategy of silence and of the exclusion of the membership, alongside ambiguous and misleading statements apparently aimed at keeping a self-appointed board of directors in control of such affairs as still exist. That sort of approach, I would prefer to leave to Putin.

It's maybe also worth observing that, at time of writing, all league games, run by the SPFL, are off while a few yards along the corridor, all four Scottish Cup ties, with their attendant TV money and run by the SFA, are still on. On the other hand maybe it's simply a case of the SFA not having noticed that it's been snowing because they are still looking for the "Morton ball".

I suspect that the SPFL's take on it will largely coincide with the generic Scottish one - whatever the situation is within peeing distance of George Square gets applied to the whole country. Similarly, before Christmas, we had Ian Blair's complete inability to conceive of the effects of an accident on the A9 on a 250 mile trip to Dumfries. Observed on a sign beside a black A9 to Dingwall on a glorious morning yesterday - AVOID ROAD TRAVEL. Full stop. Complete generalisation.