Charles Bannerman

Or is Caleyjagstogether simply Schroedinger's Cat and is hence simultaneously alive and dead?

Looking at the names on the Companies House list, I would estimate about 6%. The numbers of shares held are clear and simple, but I keep tweaking very slightly my estimate of what % these represent as my perception of the voting procedure becomes clearer. Notwithstanding what I said earlier, I now have the biggest players as Muirfield Mills 27%; McGilvray family 12.5%; Savage/Orion 12%; the Supporters' Trust have a fixed 10% voting right; DFS and possible associates around 6%; Roddy Ross 4.4%. Remember that when you add up literally hundreds of individuals who have from 250 shares (0.0045%!) to a couple of thousand, these also make a considerable slice. (Note that this DOESN'T include whoever may have acquired the "new" 500,000) So, in the event of a battle for the club, who is going to jump into bed with whom? The Savage/McGilvray split of the Hospice shares may indicate a degree of empathy there, but you never know ALL of who may have fallen out with whom. You could possibly also add in there somewhere Grassa Bennett's 0.8%. Without doubt, applying the information I've come across over the last few hours, it now looks to me as if Savage + McGilvray + Muirfield Mills, totalling 51.5% (52.3 if you include GB), may well have an outright majority, but could they all co-habit? In particular, if this were to happen there would be the irony of Muirfield Mills having to put huge numbers of Charitable Trust shares handed into their control by Tullochs into coalition with two individuals with whom DFS has had a lot of pretty acrimonious "history" for a number of years. Following on from Davie's recent post, maybe the Supporters' Trust (Caleyjagstogether) 10% voting powers could ultimately hold the balance but, just as philosophers have been asking of God for centuries.... does it exist? (RandB Comeback's post went up while I was typing mine.) Based on a complete lack of evidence over a long period, I had come to the conclusion that it no longer did. Then, a few weeks ago, I thought I saw some kind of statement attributed to it.... but now I'm beginning to wonder if that was just a dream? I may be going on a bit about the CJT but, given that it controls the fourth largest block of votes within the club, this body is incredibly anonymous and thoroughly lacking in activity at a time when it may be obliged to prepare for an important role!

I now realise that I should have amended these figures to allow for some of the shares, initially allocated to Caley, Thistle and HIE, being non-voting. That changes the percentages to (approx) Muirfield Mills 30, McGilvray family 14 and Savco 13.

DD... you and I each control a handsome 0.002% of the club's equity. Muir field Mills control 23.9%, the McGilvrays have 11.1% and what has been dubbed "Savco" ? 10.6%.

In that case I should perhaps originally have said "I'm not necessarily querying it"

Seriously PandB... the Companies House entry for Inverness Thistle and Caledonian gives the state of the parties in terms of share ownership as at March 1st. The only significant changes since then that I'm aware of are the transfer of the Hospice shares and what I am assuming will be the creation of 500,000 new ones as described in Moday's statement, provision for which was made at the recent EGM.

What large debt to the bank?

What's the source of this figure of £228,000? I'm not querying it, I would just like to know where it originates from. It has relatively recently emerged that Tullochs, as well as the North and South stands, appear to have acquired the entire stadium and possibly the lease from the Common Good Fund as well - in exchange for spiriting away the £2M+ of debt which looked like sinking the club in the early 2000s. It's therefore possible that the sum in question covers rent not only of the North and South stands but also of the main stand and whatever the CGF fund charge in rent for the site. What's not yet clear is who currently holds the lease of the site from the CGF.

Try Companies House.

That's pretty well it, apart from the minor detail that Jock McDonald was the inaugural chairman for 15 months until May 1995 when he was succeeded by Dougie who was in office until February 2000. Irrespective of what people say about David Sutherland, without the Tulloch intervention of 2000-01 the club may well have gone bankrupt and without the Tulloch intervention of 2004-05 to provide the stands, goodness knows what its future in the SPL would have been. DFS once told me that Tulloch intervened to a total extent of £5.3M and this claim does stand up to the arithmetic. One intriguing revelation has been that Tulloch are proposing to "repatriate" the main stadium as well as the N and S stands to the club. The main stadium was what was handed over initially to the ICT Charitable Trust in 2001 as a quid pro quo for spiriting away that £2M+ of debt but it seems that a sequence of complex deals led to ownership eventually passing to Tullochs, as the real quid pro quo for really having taken up that debt. In his "pre-happy clappy period", before he found God on that legendary holiday to Damascus, Caley D used to give the club pelters on here over that deal, where Tullochs effectively paid off the debt. As for Alan Savage, Companies House records that Orion hold 275189 (precisely captain!) shares in the club. This is presumably what it cost Orion to fund Niculae for the time he was here. This has now been highlighted by today's revelation that AS, DMG and IMG have gone 3 ways on the Hospice shares - a revelation which, in conjunction with DMG announcing a bid for two directors, is bound to spark speculation about a possible power struggle. In that event, the biggest shareholding is the 729,500 of the ICT Charitable Trust. These are mainly or even entirely the original Tulloch uptake from the 2001 bailout which were donated to the Trust. The Trust is now effectively controlled by Muirfield Mills, who are currently also well represented on the Board. So add in Muirfield Mills' own 376,00 shares and they have a clout of 1.05 million. Against that, and with the 3 way split of the Hospice shares, Orion/"Savco" has 466,500 and the McGilvray family (inc earlier acquisitions) just over 487,000. So McGilvray + Orion/"Savco" comes to 0.954M. Then there are significant holdings such as Roddy Ross (170,000), George Fraser (51,000), David Sutherland (his personal shares - 50,000), David Cameron (100,000) and Graeme Bennett (29,000). Where their loyalties may end up isn't entirely clear (although in certain cases that WON'T be with McGil/Savco!!) and we also don't know who have acquired what we assume to be the 500,000 shares corresponding to the "new money" announced in yesterday's statement. This is all in relation to a total of 4.4M issued shares (the previous 3.9M plus the assumed new 500,000, but extendable to 5M) The total number of shareholders, many of them owning just a token 250 but others into the thousands, is around 530. As a result, any battle for control of Caley Thistle could become an interesting sequence of events involving a large number of fragmented parties.

Huisdean... there was also an Allan MacKenzie at the Academy round about that time who was also a "clever chap" and went on to do Law.... and ended up as the Caley's solicitor in the latter stages of the merger business. This was a different Allan (same spelling though) and his father was head of Chemistry at the High School. At the time of the merger, this Allan worked for Ledingham Chalmers and latterly was hugely influential in getting the merger to work.

I think this observation more or less epitomises the club's situation as a whole and I also think that the difference is now that, with yesterday's statement, the situation has been acknowledged and largely clarified, and commitments have been made to make best efforts to sort a lot of things. I know there was a false dawn with what Willie Finlayson said at Robbo's unveiling but it does appear that yesterday's offering draws a genuine line in the sand. This will not, however, be anything like a quick fix - either on the pitch or behind the scenes and it would be unwise to expect one. On the other hand, communication, despite the absolutely desperate state it has been in for some time, is something which can probably be turned round quicker than most aspects.

Well this isn't something you could leave to rough boys from the Tecky

Andy Smith's sister to turn the whole saga into a novel?

The measures of boardroom vodka are probably too small!

You mean wealthy individuals making charitable donations to shore up and subsidise a company which, for a variety of reasons, is unable to generate enough income to produce the results some of its supporters expect?

Finmack and Gringo very much echo my own concern. On the day John Robertson was unveiled as the new manager and on other occasions, the Chairman made a definite commitment to improve communication and extend openness. Since then, the huge, pre-existing need to do this has actually increased but absolutely nothing of substance has emerged - apart from (at least?) four spectacular Public Relations own goals. (An utterly crass statement about season tickets, the incredibly poor handling of the sacking of Duncan Shearer, the totally unnecessary highlighting of Porngate and the equally unnecessary highlighting of the Ross Draper transfer request leading to the embarrassment of two conflicting versions of same going head to head in the public domain.) When the commitment to improve is made, the need to do so increases but still nothing is done about it, it is inevitable that, in its search for an explanation, fans and the public will include worst case scenarios among their thinking.

Do you mean along the lines of the noise created or along the lines of the capacity that all three Rose Street meetings had to make critical decisions?

That is essentially what he also told the BBC - that the notion of the transfer request was instigated by the club and not by him. On the other hand the club's version appears to be that the transfer request was instigated by the player. During today the respective parties have offered these two completely contrasting versions of the same scenario.

The amount of silly money flying around some parts of the Highland League might actually make progress there quite difficult!

On the day John Robertson was appointed, there was a pledge from the Chairman that communication would, as a priority, improve greatly. Clearly this hasn't happened, despite the ever increasing and obvious need for it to do so, so what has been preventing the delivery of a very public commitment?

In the interests of balance, the disparity of resources could perhaps also be pointed out, but I don't think that detracts too much from the point being made.

.... probably including any of the 33 out of 33 that Inverness College seem to have managed to get to fail their Higher Media Studies over the last two years. But for the moment to turn to Chris's OP - what a swingeing and well articulated condemnation of a summer of chaos within a club which just two years previously was displaying the Scottish Cup and playing in Europe. Apart from the extent of the decline, its rate has also been eye watering. The only part of Chris's precis with which I might differ is on players and management. Given the extreme lack of funds, I'm not sure if appointments and recruitment could be expected to be any better. I retain an element of cautious, albeit necessarily limited optimism in this department. We really must also wonder just how close to the wire - electric fence even - finances have got in recent months; and to what extent has paying silly money to poorly motivated mediocrity been responsible? Returning now to public relations and communications , I despair no less - indeed even more now - than I've done for several years. This is something I've been trying to make clear to them for a long time but I've seen neither the capacity nor the will to do anything about it - nor indeed even any concept of the need to win friends and influence people and the attendant role of communication. Quite frankly, a few cheesy, happy clappy tweets (and even these have now disappeared) don't begin to pass muster here. Communication and PR have been dreadful, awful, pathetic, abysmal and God knows how many other adjectives out of the same stable. Worse still, the deficit has been obscured behind a firewall of happy-clappy complacency. Chris rightly highlighted Seasonticketgate, Shearergate and Porngate. These are all toe-curlingly embarrassing foul ups of the highest order but are also simply the continuation of a long established trend. However the most revealing feature of this thread has been the rate at which it has grown even within a couple of hours. It's telling as well as distressing, to see so many Caley Thistle fans who are regular, articulate and respected posters on this forum spontaneously echoing what the OP has rightly said. When you get such unanimity among so many contributors with proven track records for commenting on these things, you see in the starkest of terms the situation the club is in and the deep concerns of its supporters. As for the Draper issue, not only is this another reflection of the relative status of the two Highland clubs, it's also the latest example of Roy MacGregor being in a position to rub Caley Thistle's noses right in it. And having had to endure "Always In Our Shadow", "Pride Of The Highlands" etc, it's difficult to criticise him for this.

Que?

"Scottish football in protectionist self-interest shock!"