Charles Bannerman

Once again, you arrive at the central issue here… the elephant in the room which is Morrison’s large loan secured by the club’s assets.

I didn’t even take my own discussion as far as the transfer of the BF shares! Given also the fate of the other three financial wheezes, I think there’s been a lot of premature shouting from the rooftops- and you could probably add that other fantasy which was Ketan Makwana to that lot. It’s also worrying that two of the failed wheezes - the concert company and the BF - generated a lot of bad will against the club, given the traders who lost money from the former and the very public bad mouthing of the Council by then representatives of the club while planning was being sought for the latter.

I can’t say I’ve ever had much faith in this battery farm from the very start. Certainly the “£3.4 million” seemed to be a huge carrot but, given what’s emerged over the last few months about the club’s governance, I do wonder if that should have been taken with as big a pinch of salt and dose of scepticism as a lot else that’s happened. I think that ever since that figure of £3.4 million - and I suppose I’d have to take the “credit” ?? for winkling it out of Morrison at that meeting back in the spring - emerged, its sheer enormity has possibly eclipsed a lot of rational thinking. In particular, I think there’s been the delusion that “this is such a massive panacea for the club that there can’t possibly be anything wrong with it”. And now that the Scottish Government, notwithstanding its enthusiasm for green projects, has rejected the appeal, I think we need to accept the initial 2-1 vote in favour of it as something of an unrepresentative anomaly, which tends to fly in the face of the combined verdicts of the full council and the Scottish Government who must probably be accepted as having made the “right” decision in planning terms. I do accept that HC’s second vote happened on the strength of a “technicality”, but equally it seems that the original three councillors made a wrong planning decision. I think we must therefore consign the battery farm to the list of other catastrophic money making wheezes that sent the club off on a wild goose chase for several years that ended with the current administration problem. This is probably also further justification of Alan Savage’s view that we need to return focus to football-related activities.

I hadn’t until today been taking much notice of League One crowds apart from Inverness ones (which seem to end in 01-05 incredibly frequently) and was quite surprised to see the crowd at Cove today was as low as 551. At Inverness they remain in the 1509-1900 range and today in League One, the 1565 for the local derby between Montrose and Arbroath was way above any of the others and probably exceptional because it was a derby. So far, ICT don’t seem to have done too badly maintaining the kind of crowds they had in the Championship with a fairly small drop off. Let’s hope that this can continue because a fall to what emerges as typical L1 numbers would be fairly disastrous. A credible campaign to survive in the third tier would certainly help.

Aw… I would have loved to get a photo of the three of them!

The ultimate result… an away win over the league leaders. What an afternoon!

That has been my worry ever since it emerged that he had lodged that Charge over any or all of the assets. Presumably this means he is a secured creditor so if he wants to, he could lay claim to whatever part of the assets the District Valuer (if these still exist) reckons he would be due. Alternatively, as AS has suggested, Morrison could accept shares in lieu. I just don’t know how that could be organised if a new owner is to be found, but in relation to current numbers, that could make him the biggest shareholder by some distance. Although I don’t hold Morrison as culpable as Gardiner for the last five years, I quite frankly wouldn’t welcome any further involvement in this club on the part of Ross Morrison. And by the way… if Alan Savage does eventually take control of the company, what should we call it? SAVCO?

I’m guessing here, since my desire to retain my will to live has won the battle with my need to read the Articles of Association, but I imagine that there will be some kind of ring fencing there for the ST’s stake. This isn’t a conventional shareholding in the sense of the 4.9 million ordinary shares, but a provision to allow the ST an influence of 10% in any vote, irrespective of how many shares the company has. I’m less clear about how well set in tablets of stone this is and how easily it could be changed in administration, and it has to be said that its existence makes the club that bit more expensive to purchase - as Mr Makwana et al will already have discovered under different rules. The ST “slice” has its origins in what began life as a 50% stake held by the original Members’ Club to reflect the net asset input in the mid 90s of Thistle and Caley, which I think ended up at around £1.2M after expenses and (considerable!) legal fees. When Tullochs rescued the club in 2000/01, they required that 50% to be considerably reduced since it was a major obstacle to future investment and the control of the club that they, not unreasonably, required in order to rescue it from its financial crisis at that time. On that subject, it was said that the debt in 2000 was £2.3M. Add the current debt of £3.4M to the £2.7M that Tullochs were said to have contributed over and above whisking away the £2.3M and then perhaps £1M that Alan Savage is putting in at the moment, plus £4.9M in shares purchased since 1996 and you get a total of £14M+ of other people’s money that the club has gone through since foundation, with nothing tangible to show for it other than a 7500 seater stadium (courtesy of Tullochs) and the remaining 69 years of the 1994 ground lease. Although not as large as the extent to which Ross County has benefited from the assistance of benefactors, it’s not ballparks away, although achieved in a far more random, hand to mouth manner. If anyone can spot any error in my arithmetic here, I would (genuinely!) be pleased to be told.

I don’t think it’s possible to attribute blame solely or even (with one exception) mainly to any single individual. Caley Thistle’s current problems are the product of a perfect storm of years of errors and mismanagement both on and off the pitch, and those currently in place who were previously in junior coaching positions or were simply individual players or didn’t feature at all when the real decline was ongoing, shouldn’t be made to carry the can. One factor I would want to highlight is the dreadful internal atmosphere within the club over a period of years which I think many of us knew was the case and which was superbly illustrated in the PandJ’s series on Gardiner - who also very publicly sought to take credit for appointing Duncan Ferguson. It’s clear that the atmosphere in the club had for a long time been utterly toxic and I believe that, alongside extremely poor financial practices at board level, this had an extremely damaging effect that percolated right through to on-field performances. There has been a lot more as well, and these are not things that will suddenly be put right in the immediate aftermath of certain high profile departures since May.

Some of the people who have been running this club in recent years seem to be re-enacting some great big game of Monopoly - buying, selling, wheeling, dealing in all manner of tradable items. Meanwhile the club has gone from Mayfair to Old Kent Road without even passing Go and collecting £200. I think the administrator is going to get his eyes opened when he realises the amount of complete nonsense that’s been going on, allegedly in the name of football.

Danny… I think you are perhaps conflating two events that occurred a couple of years apart. In June 1994, a District Council committee unanimously agreed to invite the club to lease land at East Longman. Certain IDC officials, who fought an abortive rearguard action against the club getting anything, tried to make difficulties but to no effect. The stadium then went through the Highland Regional Council planning process which was very rigorous and expensive and this in part contributed to the club’s need to apply for assistance from IDC, which is how the second event arose. That process of obtaining £900K was hugely complex and controversial and riddled with legal technicalities and ran from the late summer of 1995 through to the spring of 1996. By this stage, IDC no longer existed with the promise to give the money still unfulfilled when the single Highland Council came into being. HC’s inaugural CEO Arthur McCourt solved the problem by paying the cash from the Common Good Fund. The land is also owned by the CGF and the club has a lease until 2093. I would imagine that if Armageddon occurred at the club, anyone hoping to acquire the lease would need planning permission for whatever they intended to replace the stadium on the site.

If you want to claim that the club “made money” out of the Concert Company, then you also have to accept that what it did was to indulge in morally reprehensible sharp practice that allowed it to asset strip the Concert Company of ground rent and staff fees before the CC went bust, leaving a large number of honest and innocent traders out of pocket in order to allow that profit to be made. That the CC was in practice, although not by law, part of the FC and the FC, possibly benefiting from its associated status, hence hung out the CC’s creditors to dry whilst filling its own pockets, was morally a disgrace. This has done the FC vast reputational damage, which is reflected in a lot of the schadenfreude that still can be seen in the replies to the many recent newspaper reports of its near demise. At the last AGM in April 2023, I pressed the point of the losses made by the CC and was appalled at Gardiner’s smugness when he told the meeting that the club had contrived financial benefit from a situation where its own gross incompetence had led others to lose a lot of money. That is one of the reasons why it’s only since Gardiner’s departure and other events of this summer that I have again managed to feel comfortable about having anything at all to do with the club.

To me, Morrison’s large secured loan has always been one of the central issues here. As I understand the Charge, the security amounts to any or all of the club’s assets - which clearly raises the immediate issue of the future of the stadium. Morrison’s options would appear to be - to insist on full repayment which would immediately put the future of the stadium at risk; to write the whole lot off entirely; to accept shares in the company in lieu of payment and hence become the largest shareholder, although what these would nominally be worth post-administration is anyone’s guess; to do nothing and leave the debt outstanding; or some combination of the above. It’s strange. When they sold off the Social Club for something like £140K to Grassa’s pension fund a dozen years ago or so, I found myself talking about “selling off the family silver”…. but I thought at the time that taking this policy much further (as has happened big time) was inconceivable. In the end, it emerges that this was just the thin end of the wedge. I really find myself getting quite angry every time I ask the question- “How and why the HELL did they persist for at least five years with a policy of gross over-expenditure sustained by ever more absurd attempts to persevere with it?

I wouldn’t want to take my chances on court with a smart brief doing his best to persuade the judge that what had been said or written was a specific allegation rather than a gut feeling or non-specific innuendo. And if matters do move in a certain direction, I’d suggest that discretion is the better part of valour when posting here and elsewhere.

I think, even at this stage, it’s a bit risky even to be implying criminality in general and by any individual in particular. The administrator was asked about possible criminality and, in a very circumspect answer, did seem to imply that, should any emerge, it would be followed up.

These are seen to be fresh bids - apparently from new expressions of interest.

All behind the scenes jobs retained for the moment, with possible reductions in hours. AS, who was at the top table with the admin and was confirmed as on his way on to the board, committed to ongoing funding, and this is probably why redundancies are relatively light. There have been three bids since the Admin came in… AS isn’t one of them. They expect the process to take weeks rather than months. The Admin confirmed that they would be looking at past financial practices and - when prompted - agreed that if there had been criminality, it would be looked into. Debt situation not yet clear and admin wouldn’t discuss any individual creditor when RM’s name was raised. Proposal to convert “Kingsmills Suite” into a restaurant franchise. I was encouraged by the cautiously optimistic vibes I got.

You have got it in one, Snorbens! As it happens, as this has unfolded in recent weeks, I’ve been finding myself wanting more and more to do a follow up, and you even provided me with the ideal title - “Against All Frauds”. However the litigation risk is so high that it’s an absolute no-no - which is also, unfortunately, a sad reflection of how it is indeed possible to suppress information by threatening to make things very difficult for those providing it. Although it will never happen, I actually think there’s a lot of scope for a book starting end on from Against All Odds and documenting the club’s chequered fortunes as a business from the debacle that led to the Tulloch rescue if 2000, through the “glory years” to the current mess, interspersed by episodes from the football part of the history as well.

What he doesn’t seem to be “getting” is that, even by the time he took over last year the club, as a business, had already been “on a life support machine” (did these Fanzinists of 3 or 4 decades ago have second sight?!) for years, and the only chance the company has really had for some time has been to go into administration - however unpalatable. And with that, we once again come back to the same root cause of the final phase of all this - a chairman who thought that a football club should be run like a property developer failing to control a CEO who was not only alarmingly incompetent but also steadily became behaviourally more bizarre as time went on.

I think Scot Gardiner was a very easy individual to take an instant dislike to. He simply exuded an unpleasant aura which his intermittent attempts at charm utterly failed to conceal. The PandJ’s public exposure of that was a masterpiece.

I think we need to get straight that this is an administration situation where one of the next possible steps is, unfortunately, the morgue. To avoid that, the administrator is going to take any steps he can, however drastic, to cut expenditure, and high up that agenda is cutting the wage bill. We are well, well past thinking about who we would like to see as a replacement and the thought of signing up any new staff to do jobs that can be done from within the existing payroll - and possibly these even at reduced wages - seems inconceivable.

SPFL

Alan is bang on the money there (no pun intended). Five years ago, the club was already in a position where it had just had to raise £1 million, mainly from two large contributions, in new share capital simply to keep running (and overspending). Since then, it's been one outing for the begging bowl after another and that should never have been allowed to continue for five minutes, never mind five years. What he says about Concert Companies is spot on as well. Apart from the idea being wrong for a football club, the level of gross incompetence involved was breathtaking and the extra bad feeling about the club that was created has been catastrophic. I would find it difficult to criticise any businesses left short after that if I heard that they were rubbing their hands with glee whilst washing down their Karma and chips with a pint of Schadenfreude.

Similarly, I hope that BDO doesn't stand for "Broke, Destitute and On the street" (Black Humour alert)

The abiding mystery for me is how the total inertia of the board + CEO continued/ was allowed to continue for so long - over a period of years - when it was crystal clear to all that the entire scenario was steadily going down the toilet. It would be interesting to establish just how long Ross Morrison and Gardiner go back as an “item”, because to me, that was the essential “power couple” in a scenario where the Chairman should have been closely supervising the CEO, but it appears that the converse may well have been the case. The Gardiner - Morrison “axis”, controlled by the former rather than the latter, then appears to have been able to sideline the rest of the board and the amount of money Morrison was putting in to cover losses very possibly also gave him extra clout in relation to the other board members. We therefore have to ask just how accountable the CEO was to his nominal bosses, as the various faux pas that Alan Savage has since uncovered mounted up and expenditure reached incomprehensible levels. The Administrator’s principal task is to try to save the company as a going concern for the future, but I also wonder to what extent he will need to make a deep and critical appraisal of exactly how that company got into the state it did? That, I believe, would be revealing in the extreme.