Charles Bannerman

I remain concerned about this document - a charge filed with Companies House in January, suggesting that the large sums loaned by Ross Morrison have security such as the stadium and car parks, which could hence be called in on failure to pay. I asked questions at last night’s meeting which seemed to elicit the answer that, despite various statements that this had/ hadn’t/ had etc been written off, the £3.4M was still very much owed, although administration had the scope to cancel this. The answer from the top table indicated that these loans would be converted to shares, but I’m still not clear as to whether the stadium is in any remaining danger of being “claimed” if this gets messy. Any arrangement with a “Right… if you can’t pay, I’m having the stadium” potential - which this Charge appears to say - has got to be a worry, and I’m not sure if even Alan Savage has a full answer to that yet.

I think £200K seems to be less than the average monthly expenditure. I don’t know what turnover has been because the accounts aren’t required to state it, but £2 million mightn’t be a bad guess. Add the projected £1.2M for the current year to that to get expenditure and you’ve got £3.2M which is a bit over £260K in a month. There therefore has to be some concern if (or rather when) the £200K isn’t reached, then how are they going to manage to pay the October wages?

There seems to be some uncertainty there. The people who currently run the club aren’t aware of any money having changed hands, but it’s been alleged that Carlisle have suggested that it did.

Administration soon after October 16th now looks inevitable following what I thought was a very good meeting, packed with around 200 attendees. It was fairly clear that the Board and Alan Savage pretty strongly “prefer” Administration as the lesser of two evils, the other being Option Micawber - soldiering on and “waiting for something to turn up”. It was equally clear that much of the reason for holding the meeting was to test the temperature of the water as regards Administration and a show of hands between Admin and Micawber was roughly evenly divided. Alan Savage said that he would meet the cost of administration - which he also expects to remove a vast pile of debt. There seemed to be a stoical acceptance that the resulting 15 point penalty might very well result in League Two football next season. Anger directed at Gardiner was palpable, with the astonishingly inept kit deal leading the charge - followed very closely by many of the other sh!tshows that plagued the five year infliction of this individual on the club. It’s clear that the crowdfunder has only minimal chance of even getting close to its £200K target, but that already seems to be receding into the background. There’s probably more I could write but the video will tell it all.

I think tomorrow night may be the one thing that could stall the decline.

This, unfortunately, is not looking good. Based on taking the £20,000 out of the equation and adjusting the target to £180,000, I’ve tried to do a few sums, but there are so many variables that errors are quite substantial - although you can see that donations are currently fading away at an alarming rate. Predictably there was a huge initial surge and the first four hours saw donations at a rate of 86 per hour bringing in £3267 per hour. Over the next 24 hours that dropped to 24 per hour producing £850 per hour. Another 24 hours on and it’s down to 12 and £270 and the remaining 24 hours up to the time I’m writing this have yielded 8 donations /£210. The last 24 hours have therefore yielded £5000 and there’s been a clear and ongoing decline in the rate right from the start. Even if it held at £5000 per day, then it would only make £95,000 of the £180,000 target by the deadline so, adding the £20K back in, that would only produce £115,000 of the £200,000 target. However that assumes that the underlying decline in the donation rate suddenly stops which seems highly unlikely. There may well be some kind of unforeseen change in donation habits, such as a surge through desperation as the 16th October deadline approaches, but the numbers at the moment seem to suggest that this appeal will do well to reach half its target amount of £200,000 by its target date of 16th October. So if that’s roughly the way it does pan out… is that going to mean administration for certain?

Is this question not partly hypothetical since, even if there was a will within the ST to make such a change, this could never be practically achieved in the ten days that remain before the 16th October deadline - when we have been told that the club will go into administration if the £200K is not reached?

It’s OK Snorbens…. it’s Dougal…. it’s just the kind of bitter and frustrated curmudgeonliness from him that we have all come to know and expect. Cut the poor soul a bit of slack since there’s clearly not much else in his life if you deprive him of the anonymous abuse on here which is his only opportunity to feel as if he has achieved something.

My feelings precisely, OCG. First choice a bigger venue to accommodate all interested parties (pity the Rose Street Hall is no longer) and if that wasn’t possible then there should have been priority for shareholders and season ticket holders. In the case of shareholders, I would point out that they actually own the company and the AGM has been overdue since July 26th.

This really isn’t good enough. There should have been priority for season ticket holders and shareholders - or they should have used a bigger venue, even if it cost money. They are asking people to shell out cash to help them to survive and they haven’t even made adequate arrangements to accommodate these people.

And it’s nice that our rivals across the Bridge are helping out as well.

Good luck with that laudable initiative… but did you not know that both Rangers and Celtic lost heavily in Europe midweek - causing the national media to be totally engaged in collective pant wetting.

In other words, a certain amount of the family silver has already been flogged - and the thin end of the wedge there was selling off the Social Club building some years ago to Grassa’s pension fund. That, of course, was a perfectly legitimate transaction, but it also marked the start of the Faustian process which now sees administration as a very real prospect.

That’s the most encouraging statement I’ve heard since the referee’s full time whistle at Hampden on 30.5.15.

Is it not just three? Gordy Fyfe, Grassa and Scott Young?

I see at least two obstacles to this £200K being raised - people’s understandable reluctance to put their money into something that may well go to the wall, and the poor public perception the club has as a result of things like the Concert Company and a fair bit more. Then, if it’s not raised and the club does indeed go into administration, there’s always a tendency for people to look at the most recent issue as the decisive factor. Hence the “blame” might tend to be focused on Joe Public’s “lack of generosity” towards the crowdfunding project rather than chronic mismanagement and lack of supervision and control that goes back for years. One other thought. Doesn’t it now seem absolutely absurd that several vital weeks over the summer should have been wasted on the delusional chancer that was Ketan Makwana whom just about everybody else instantly saw through with only a fraction of the information available to those who swallowed this fantasy and “accepted” it as a realistic plan to identify a new “owner”.

Based on last year’s pay outs for League One, the difference between a second place finish and somewhere further down amounts to chickenfeed compared with the financial magnitude of the problem. This strikes me as a complete red herring…. and possibly an attempt to pass some of the onus on to the football side.

At the moment the club is attempting to sustain full time football on Third Tier income streams…. before you even consider the vast seven figure black hole that has been building up for the last seven years or so.

I don’t have time to post any more than this for now but Panos Thomas has emailed shareholders with a very lengthy update where the headline looks like being confirmation that, unless £200K can be raised by October 16th, then Administration would be “inevitable” since the club would be insolvent.

I’m not by any means saying that this isn’t the real thing, but across the summer there have been enough U-turns on the Administration issue (one of these on a timescale of just nine hours), to make it worth waiting for a formal announcement before totally believing anything.

Cracker!!!

This is at least the third, or maybe even the fourth time since early summer that this “administration” line has emerged from the club, and on each of the previous occasions it has been fairly quickly (on one occasion within nine hours) been countermanded by a statement that something or other has been “fixed” by people agreeing to do something, and everyone can breathe easily again. l’m not sure whether various possible analogies include The Grand Old Duke Of York and The Boy Who Cried Wolf?

I think a face to face encounter between the Board/Alan Savage and the shareholders, and probably the wider fan base as well, is now needed fairly urgently. The AGM is now two months overdue and, while I appreciate that they’ve been busy with other things, I think it now needs to be held - but should be followed quickly by an open meeting for fans. I think that the least the Board must answer to is having failed to monitor, oversee and restrain Scot Gardiner but I also think that, as the body ultimately responsible for running the club, they must also be called on to explain how ICTFC has, over a period of years, got into the most unimaginable mess. However I also appreciate that the immediate past Chairman no longer holds any position in the club but he should possibly be given an invitation to attend.

That’s an absolutely vital consideration. There are two issues here. Sure, Gardiner has been a complete shitshow in every conceivable facet of his involvement with this club, but he would never have been in a position to wreak any of that havoc if he had been properly supervised and controlled (as any employee should be) by the Board, and in particular the Chairmen he worked under. Given the extent of that havoc, it must surely have been painfully obvious from an early stage, so were there not clear grounds for dismissal on the grounds of incompetence? Neither of the Chairmen who should have been overseeing his activities is still in post, but should at least some still-serving Board members not be accepting corporate responsibility for this mess and considering their positions?

I thought that one of the main reasons for creating a separate Concert Company was to protect the Football Company from any financial misfortune. On that basis, it seems difficult to see how the football club could be liable for money that may have been loaned to the now defunct CC. If Gardiner did lend money to the CC, then I would take a huge drink of schadenfreude at the thought that he has been hoist with his own petard and finds himself in the same position as a list of honest local traders who were out of pocket when a company in which he played a central role failed and collapsed. I trust that any audit will be thorough and forensic in the extreme, because among other things it is absolutely necessary to establish whether there has been any activity that might be judged negligently incompetent or even criminal, and which might therefore become a potential cause for legal proceedings. In that event, perhaps any such proceedings could be held at the Caledonian Stadium where a sell-out crowd - unlike the previous concerts - would generate record profits. That audit could perhaps start by addressing how a company that was meant to be economising could lose over £3 million in three years, including, in 2023-24, a massive £1.7M which means that what it spent in that year was around 75% more than it earned.