The only realistic way to pay back debts is to get to the Premier League

It’s been a while. Geoff Sheard has been dismissed as a fantasist by most right-thinking people, thanks in large part to some good work from Rob Wargh at the Yorkshire Post. Now Wednesday and the Trust are supposed to be working together, as there seems to be no external solution to our current plight. Great news, and I’m happy to see everyone pulling in the same direction at last.

This story has riled me a little bit, though. The initiative is not so bad – fans chipping in to help out their club – but the idea of spending this money on players is extremely wrong-headed. Wednesday fans have done this before, because we are not used to having a chairman take all the financial responsibility. We collectively have therefore participated the Save Our Owls scheme in the 1970s, bought the almost worthless ‘C’ shares in the same decade, and raised around £300,000 towards putting a roof on the kop in the middle of the 1980’s. That was quite a feat, as it occured during a time when Sheffield was not exactly dancing with economic joy and happiness after the Thatcher government’s pit and steel works closures.

The parallel with the impending recession is obvious, but there are serious difficulties with the plan, the most obvious being the assumptions underlying the use to which money will be put. There are also issues about the individualistic society Wednesday now operate in, the vastly increased ticket prices that don’t leave much goodwill or spare cash, and the amount of money Keys mentions in the article being a lot for the average Wednesdayite, but for now we’ll concentrate on the football side of things.

In the Telegraph story, Darryl Keys is quoted as saying

I can’t see any individual writing out a big cheque in the current economic climate. The only realistic way to repay debts is to get back to the Premier League. And to do that there has to be investment in the squad.

Players lose matches on a regular basis, even expensive players. Wednesday have one of the lower budgets in the league, and an extra £1m is not going to put the club among the top 5. We would still be fighting with one arm tied behind our back, but the new player(s) would be under a lot of pressure, and getting promotion would be a long way off.

More than that, Wednesday putting an extra £1m into the wage inflation is going to damage other clubs, and indeed Wednesday, in the longer term. We don’t have the deepest pockets, so players leaving smaller clubs to play for us are not going to stop here if someone richer comes calling. We’re no strangers to that, Bougherra, Brunt and Whelan have all moved on to better teams in the recent past, but is it really the way we should spend funds we’ve raised?

Geoff Sheard’s buddy in Dominca

So, Geoff Sheard showed Dave Allen and Darryl Keys proof of funds, but they weren’t the funds he was going to use to buy the football club. That’s what the Yorkshire Post says today, anyway:

THE man behind a proposed bid to buy control of Sheffield Wednesday acknowledges he did provide proof of funding from an offshore bank in Dominica – but insists the money behind the takeover was always based in a Swiss bank account.

Geoff Sheard, who denied the Dominica connection in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post, said he produced a letter from the Private Capital Bank as a means of getting a “foot-in-the-door” to open talks. He said a friend owns the bank.

Dismissing the Dominica link as “irrelevant”, Sheard said: “I think a lot of things have happened since that document came out – that was a get a foot-through-the-door document but it has nothing to do with the purchase of the football club and nothing to do with the source of funding. The money is from a Swiss bank.”

Geoff Sheard, Wednesdayite and piss-ups in breweries

Geoff Sheard, Keith Addy and Geoff Hulley are getting an awful shoeing from various quarters for the hold-ups in the takeover, but it seems that another party have been let off rather lightly. Wednesdayite voted overwhelmingly to sell their shares to Sheard, and to change the rule that prevents them doing so. You’d hope that this would be concluded quickly, but apparently Sheard hasn’t asked for the shares yet.

When he does, he might face a bit of an obstacle. The Financial Services Authority regulate mutual societies like Wednesdayite, and as such hold a copy of the rules of all mutual societies so registered. When a society changes its rules, it must register the change with the FSA for it to be valid. A society must, and I quote from the email I received on this subject, ‘comply with its registered rules’.

So, more than two weeks after the members of Wednesdayite voted to change the rules, has their board registered this with the FSA? According to the Mutual Societies section of the FSA, they haven’t even made an application to do so. Why haven’t they done this? Are they incompetent? It’s a possibility, but it’s also possible that this – and the current messageboard trashing of Addy and Hulley – is part of their PR strategy. PR reasons were invoked for a ‘yes’ vote, and it seems that the directors have not taken seriously the chance of selling their shares to Geoff Sheard. If they posted their application today, it would be received on Tuesday, leaving just four working days for the paperwork to be done by the FSA before the end of the transfer window, paperwork that is necessary before a potential sale to Sheard can proceed.

So who exactly is blocking the takeover, and why aren’t Wednesdayite serious about selling?

Eve of season call to arms. Or call to pub. One of the two, anyway….

This contribution comes from a lifelong Wednesdayite known as ‘Mielenkiintoisten Siiderien Juoja’:

At the age of 7, I sat in my living room and watched Chris Woods limbo dance under Andy Linighan’s header after 210 minutes of the FA Cup final. I’d been to Wembley to watch Wednesday 4 times before, winning two, drawing one and losing one and now we’d finished up empty handed after a thrilling season. I was gutted, but knew it wouldn’t be long before we were back at Wembley, and maybe next time we wouldn’t have to play Arsenal. It was widely believed for 2 and half years that Wednesday could, with a following wind, be champions of England.

Since then I have invested more and more of my time, money and emotional well-being into following Wednesday, as the dizzy days of spring 1993 receded from memory and gradually we moved toward a memorable 0-0 draw at home to Rushden and Diamonds. That game was significant for me (also for the team – it was the start of a less than glorious run that left them with an 11 week wait to win another league game) because I finally, after 11 years of almost unremitting decline, found myself enjoying the crap football on offer. That needs qualifying; I wasn’t quite revelling in our shitness, but I was in no way dependent for a performance or result to allow me to enjoy my trips to Hillsborough (or London Road, Boundary Park, or even, somehow, Vale Park in lovely Burslem). I realised that the reason I went to great lengths and much expense wasn’t because I needed the affirmation of supporting a winning team. I was, after all, sat in the freezing cold watching us draw with a club that hadn’t existed a few years earlier. It was the whole routine that I went back time and again for – the journey to the pub, the pre match beers, the company and camaraderie, the predictable yet enjoyable meandering of the post match conversation away from the dreadful spectacle we’d just witnessed, only to return to Paul Smith’s merits 4 pints later with much more vigour. Football was the constant centrepiece of my weekends, providing the focal point, directing the flow of conversation and governing the mood over large parts of it. At no point did I stop caring, or even start caring less. But something changed. Where previously getting into the top half of the Premier League (or staying clear of relegation trouble, then it was getting into contention for promotion to the EPL, then it was bouncing straight back from demotion to the third tier) had been something akin to a burning ambition, now it was a land far far away that would be lovely to visit. In other words, I stopped expecting success as a right because of SWFC’s history, fanbase, ‘big club’ status or anything else. I acknowledged our status as a football club like any other, and accepted the slings and arrows that had brought us to our knees and would, perhaps, lever us up and over a whole host of other deserving cases and give us top quality winning football at the top of the pyramid again in the future.

But I won’t hold my breath for that. Frankly, I’m not sure if I want Wednesday to have a crack at the Premiership.

Think about those years at the end of the 90s where we were throwing (inadequate amounts of) money at the playing squad in a desperate effort to stand still. Even in my blinkered adolescent loyalty to anything in a blue and white shirt (I was 15 when we dropped out of the Premiership) some of the players rang alarm bells in my head – for the first time ever, I saw players fulfilling my lifetime dream who seemingly didn’t give a toss about the club or the city. Do we want to go back to 1999, casting around for players of the calibre to get us safely to 17^th (that particular calibre of player who wouldn’t be anywhere near a genuine mid-table side and have 2 or 3 relegations on their CV)? Paying out a million pounds a year to average journeymen to allow us to ‘compete’ in the 3^rd mini-league of the Premiership? Do we want to get there in 2 years with someone else’s money? I can’t help but feeling, similar to the administration debate, that whoring ourselves out as a vehicle for a rich man’s ego is not a particularly proper or satisfying way of getting anywhere. Why should clubs be allowed to live beyond their means in either manner – when the shit hits the fan for those borrowing (see Rotherham, Luton, L**ds etc) they get a points handicap in retrospective recognition that they have been competing unfairly. Maybe injecting large amounts of other people’s money should also bring a handicap?

Buckle says ‘vote no’

The voices against selling the Wednesdayite shareholding are growing louuder and more numerous. Today Phil Buckle, who stood for election to the SWFC board eight years ago, told the Sheffield Star that he is very uncomfortable with the Sheard bid, and believes a ‘no’ vote from the Wednesdayite membership would help safeguard the future of the club:

Buckle, a Wednesdayite member, said: “To the best of my knowledge, Mr Sheard has not made enough details of his business activities available for us to be able to form an opinion about his abilities and achievements.

“He has not agreed to meet the Wednesdayite membership so we won’t get the chance to ask him.

“Money is not everything; it’s how you spend it. He won’t allow his offer letter to be published in full.

“We know little or nothing about his investors and why they wish to buy into the club. There is no guarantee as to how much “new money” he will bring in.

“The alternative is to wait for an offer where we are better able to judge whether it will be in the long-term interests of the club.

“This will require patience because clearly all is not well at Hillsborough. But we only get one shot at this and we are in serious danger of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

Wednesdayite chairman Darryl Keys contested Buckle’s view, saying that the safeguards attached to the vote mean that Sheard cannot take control if he is not ’serious’.

“Each person’s opinion has to be respected. Our board debated the pros and cons long and hard. At the end of the day we had to make a decision, and the attached conditions provide safeguards,” he said.

“If Geoff Sheard is capable of delivering on all his promises, the last thing we want to do is to frighten him away and see him move on to another club. If he meets these conditions, it proves it’s serious.”

This is a dangerous line for Wednesdayite to take. The safeguards only ensure that the shares will not be sold to the previous directors, for the shares to be aggregated into one block because Wednesdayite will only sell if other shareholders do too, and for Wednesdayite to negotiate with other parties as well before completion.

The only one of these that provides any kind of comfort for those concerned with the future of Sheffield Wednesday is the one concerning not selling to any previous Director of the Plc or Club, and you have to say that this is extraordinary. Wednesdayite clearly have a grudge against certain people involved over the last few years, but excluding every former director of the club from owning those shares in the future looks petty, spiteful and counter-productive.

Wealthy Wednesday fans have been on the board, and they have not all been malicious or incompetent. Continuing vendettas via covenants on share sales, while allowing the true owners of the club to remain anonymous, is no way for a real Supporter’s Trust to operate.

Swiss based Trust – who are they?

There has been some speculation on messageboards about who exactly is behind the Trust that wants to take control of Sheffield Wednesday. One name that has been mentioned is Michael Hunt, a convicted fraudster who many QPR fans believe was involved in their club. They cannot be sure, because the ABC corporation that lent QPR £10m when they were on their knees is based in an offshore tax haven, Panama.

Hunt is well known in Britain, because he used to run Nissan’s UK division. That in itself is not so remarkable, but the fact that he perpetrated one of the biggest tax frauds ever uncovered is something that people tend to remember. His partner in crime, Nissan boss Octav Botnar, fled to Switzerland when they were caught in 1991. He avoided trial and eventually reached a settlement with the revenue, but Hunt served 4 years in prison.

Here is what the QPR website Boardroom Blues has to say about the loan their club secured from ABC:

It was to enable us to come out of administration and comply with Football League regulations, said executive director David Davies.

That was back in May 2002. QPR said at the time that the League would not allow us to start the 2002/3 season in administration. And so the death by a thousand cuts began.

Four years into the 10 year loan QPR has already paid, in interest alone, the sum of £4m. We pay the interest monthly, so we have to find £83,333 each month.

It is a 10-year loan at 10% annual interest. This means we have to pay £1m in interest each year, and then repay the lump sum of £10m at the end of the 10 years as well.

According to Davies, the loan was arranged by the administrator Ray Hocking of BDO Stoy Hayward and the lender was an acquaintance of Hocking’s.

The loan is secured against QPR’s ground which means that if we don’t keep up with the repayments the lender can force the sale of Loftus Road to get his money back. The identity of the lender, given that he has the power to make QPR homeless, is therefore vitally important.

The lender is believed by many QPR fans to be one Michael Hunt, whose identity was first revealed in a posting on the www.qprnet.com messageboard in March 2003

The ABC corporation also had involvement at Derby County. David Conn, who in a better world would be running the Football Association, wrote an excellent article about Hunt’s modus operandi, which does closely match the highly evasive and secretive strategy hitherto employed by Goeff Sheard. This excerpt comes from the brilliant QPR Report blog:

In October 2003, Derby County, relegated after six seasons in the Premier League and, under their former owner Lionel Pickering, sagging beneath pounds 31m debts, were suddenly put into receivership. The club and their ground were sold to a newly formed company, Sharmine Limited, and new directors were unveiled: Jeremy Keith, a ‘business doctor’ specialising in financially failing businesses, who had briefly been involved at Portsmouth FC before they went into administration in 1998; Steven Harding, an advertising executive, and a perhaps unlikely figure as the new chairman of Derby: John Sleightholme, a barrister and the deputy coroner for North Yorkshire.

At the time the directors said they would not reveal who owned the club, a stance they have maintained ever since. A month later, it emerged that the pounds 15m finance for their takeover had come from the same ABC Corporation, registered in Panama City.Sleightholme had been previously involved in a venture with a former Scottish players’ agent, Murdo MacKay, who, a few months later, joined Derby as the club’s director of football.

MacKay’s own business career is somewhat chequered; he was a Fifa-registered players’ agent for what he described as 11 ‘unblemished’ years, but one of his companies, Inside Soccer Recruitment, which had a high-profile launch in 2001 and was backed by the former Rangers and England centre-back Terry Butcher among others, went bust just 18 months later, owing a large tax bill and leaving creditors, including a furious Butcher, unpaid.

From 1993 to 1996, MacKay was made personally bankrupt after the failure of another recruitment agency, MMK Associates, when 19 creditors, ranging from the Inland Revenue to a furniture loan company, were left owed pounds 157,659. MacKay has, however, said he has put that behind him and is applying his knowledge of football to reviving Derby’s fortunes.

Last month, Sharmine Limited, which owns Derby, finally revealed who its owners are, but that only opened into a new layer of opaque anonymity in yet more tax havens: two of its shareholders are registered as companies in Belize, the other in the British Virgin Islands.Sources close to the deals, however, confirmed to me this week that Michael Hunt is the ultimate source of the ABC cash.

He is understood to operate a family trust registered in Switzerland, whose size, the sources said, runs into ‘nine figures’. A lawyer in Basle, Dr Hans Georg Hinderling, has represented ABC Corporation in their dealings with QPR.QPR’s current board, chaired by lifelong Rangers fan Bill Power, who took the club over last year, has since been scathing about the ABC loan it inherited: ‘It is scandalous,’ Power told me, ‘that we’ve been saddled with this debt, from a Panama corporation of all places, at such an outrageous interest rate.

This is extremely worrying for Sheffield Wednesday fans, because of the appalling terms of the loans QPR took from ABC and because of the massive debt Derby are saddled with. Secretive Swiss Trusts do not appear to be good for football clubs, so why should Sheard’s trust be any different?

Rectifying the Richards mistake

Sheffield Wednesday were, up until 1997, owned by thousands of shareholders who all held a small stake in the club. There were Original, A and B shares, which were purchased in the early years of the club by supporters who helped out when money was needed, and entitled their owners to perks like free season tickets. As a result these shares were handed down through families, had a strong sentimental as well as monetary value, and were almost all held by Wednesdayites.

There were also ‘C’ shares, issued when the club was at its lowest ebb in the 1970s, that did not give their owners perks but allowed them to go to AGMs and gave them ticket priority for big games. They were also solely held by Wednesday fans. Why would anyone else want to own them?

This situation gave the club a stable board of directors, and made it very difficult for one single individual to take control. Any potential owner would have to negotiate with hundreds if not thousands of individuals, all of whom had their own ideas about Sheffield Wednesday. Chairmen and directors were elected at AGMs rather than selected by anonymous owners, and they needed to pay attention to the shareholders who were, of course, Wednesday fans.

This was a great comfort to us when our neighbours across the city were being entertained by Director’s Box denizens like Carlo Colombotti, an Italian lawyer who promised link-ups with Juventus but gave them Mitch Ward instead; Reg Brealey, who caused pickets of Bramall Lane by the Socialist Worker’s Party because of the appalling way he treated workers at his Jute mills in India; Stephen Hinchcliffe, who was jailed in 2001 for bribery and corruption offences; Mike Macdonald, a self proclaimed Man City fan who wanted to merge the Sheffield clubs if possible or at least build a new ground and share it; and, best of all, Sam/Samantha Hashimi, an Iraqi businessman who is now an Iraq businesswoman and wanted to buy the club back in the mid-90s. Apologies to any SUFC Hall of Famers I’ve missed out.

At the SWFC AGM in 1993, a shareholder asked the board why they had spent £2.7m on Andy Sinton when for just £3.5m they could have bought SUFC, closed it down, sold Bramall Lane and become the only club in Sheffield while making a tidy profit. That’s how much of a joke United had become, primarily because ownership was tossed between sweatshop barons and criminals with little thought for the fans or team. That kind of question was often asked at AGMs in those days, when we had a decent team and a lack of debt to worry about, and shareholders went mainly to talk to the manager about on-field issues.

The early 90s were an exciting time for football in England. Sky had arrived and had a dependence on live football that would see hundreds of millions of pounds pumped into the Premier League over the next 15 years. Wednesday chairman Dave Richards thought this was great, money allowed clubs to spend more on players and increase the ‘attractiveness’ of the ‘product’. The difficulties teams got into when they were relegated were largely ignored, because Richards was convinced that Oldham Athletic and Luton Town operated in a different universe to Sheffield Wednesday, and their fate could not possibly befall his own club.

Richards was always a very political animal, and his positions at the FA and the Premier League were very important to him. He built a new South Stand at Hillsborough for the European Championships in 1996, although the extra capacity was not needed for any of the games played at Hillsborough as ticket sales for that tournament were very poor. This was financed by debt, which was sustainable because of the extra revenue the corporate facilities should generate, but it gave the football club board a taste for loans.

The vogue at the time was for football clubs to float themselves on stock exchanges. It was regarded as a necessity, a tautology, that a football club could not fund itself without recourse to the institutional shareholders that bought these shares. Tottenham Hotspur had been the first club to float on the Stock Exchange back in 1983, and along with Manchester United, their example was seen as a shining light to the rest of football’s dinosaurs.

At the height of this boom, clubs like Millwall, Sunderland, Aberdeen , Preston North End and Sheffield United were all listed on the stock exchanges. There were funds where individual investors could put their money into ‘the football sector’, so strong was the desire to get a piece of the football action. The boom did not last long.Many clubs have delisted now, with former Sunderland chairman Bob Murray claiming in 2004 that only Manchester United were suited to a stock market listing.

Unfortunately, Dave Richards and his fellow board members had decided in 1997 that Sheffield Wednesday needed to float on the Stock Exchange in order to compete with their peers. Given the complicated nature of the shareholding set out above, this was a difficult process. It was decided that the best route was a share issue, with all old shares converted into ‘new’ shares and Charterhouse, an investment bank that wanted a piece of the football pie, buying 36.7% of the new shares and injecting £16m into the club.

It was intended that this money would be enough to allow Wednesday to improve and compete at the top level, before a floatation that would make Charterhouse a lot of money and inject even more cash into the club. Unfortunately, poor transfers and bad management ensured that Wednesday struggled, and the stock market realised that football clubs might not be the gold mine they had thought. Wednesday began chasing their losses, gambling huge sums on disinterested players who still had to be paid when the club was relegated and the TV money stopped flowing. The club was in a mess, the dream of floatation and riches had died for most football teams, and at Wednesday there was no chance whatsoever of a share issue bonanza on the Stock Exchange.

Charterhouse sold three quarters of their shares to Geoff Hulley, Keith Addy and Dave Allen in 2001, with the remaining quarter gifted to the Owls Trust (now ‘rebranded’ as Wednesdayite).

At first the newly-formed Trust did not buy any more shares after this gift. They thought it might be a bad investment, that the club could go into administration and they would lose everything. Better to keep the money and invest it later on. There was a strong current of thinking that shares in the club must be aggregated, that a single dominating shareholding was the best way to secure a bright future for Sheffield Wednesday Football Club.

The idea is that rich investors want total control, and that they must be given this in the hope that they can clear the debt and move the club forward. This chimes with the current vogue in English football club ownership, after the Glazers took Manchester United off the stock market. Now the idea is that the PLC is dead (both in football and more widely), and the only way forward is for single rich investors to take a club and either run it philanthropically, like Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, or leverage it to the hilt with debt, like the Glazers at Manchester United or Gillett and Hicks at Liverpool.

I wonder what the fashion will be in a couple of years, and if Sheffield Wednesday’s Supporter’s Trust will be so eager to follow it. The club has survived and occasionally thrived for 150 years up until 1997, and since then it has hit problem after problem after problem. The sensible, safe option is to admit the mistake, seek a solution among fans and small shareholders, and finally take back the club from the mistakes of Richards and Charterhouse. The dangerous, reckless route is to aggregate a controlling stake and sell it to an anonymous offshore trust. Why is the Supporter’s Trust at my club advocating the latter over the former?

Stranger Danger – the Ipswich Town view

Ipswich Town were subject to their own takeover by anonymous owners recently, and their experience suggests that Wednesday fans might not get much comfort any time soon. Here is one Ipswich fan’s perspective on things:

Let’s see. We’ve got a Championship club, which has seen better days. They have won the League, and two different Cups, albeit many years ago, when the top flight was still being called Division One, rather than the Premier League. They haven’t been in the top flight for a few years, and the relegation, and the drop in revenue – particularly TV revenue is one of the reasons they’re in so much debt today. They’ve never been in so much debt in their entire history, and even now are losing money year on year. The only way is down. There seems no escape. The chairman’s not the most popular man at the club, and he’s not got the funds to help. What this club needs is a knight in shining armour. This club is not today’s Sheffield Wednesday, but 2007’s Ipswich Town. My club.

My club was contacted by a billionaire by the name of Marcus Evans. I say reputed, because not much is known about him. A few years ago, Evans tried to buy Trinity Mirror – publishers of the Daily Mirror. Naturally, journalists from the Mirror, as well as the other national newspapers spent a lot of time and energy trying to find out more about the man who would be the new owner of the second biggest newspaper in the country, but – nothing. Nothing of substance, at least. Not even a photograph.

Evans bid to buy into the club – unlike at Sheffield Wednesday, the new buyer did not buy existing shares, but newly created shares meaning he owns 87.5% of the club – succeeded after the club’s shareholder’s voted to allow the bid to pass. Like at Sheffield Wednesday, we also needed an injection, and part of Evans’ bid was that there would be an injection of cash into the club. This was in the form of the shares that Evans paid for. And while this has enabled Ipswich to compete in the transfer market for the first time since we were relegated in 2002, it comes as a price. Unlike the existing shareholders, Evans receives a premium on his shares. There is also a clause written into his purchase that he will receive the money he spent on acquiring the shares in the first place, if certain conditions are met. It has certainly not been an altruistic acquisition to his portfolio. Still, at least with the fact we are spending decent money on players for the first since we signed Marcus Bent in 2001. This must mean that we are free of debt, because Championship clubs in debt can’t spend seven figures on the likes of Gareth McAuley, can they?

The truthful answer is that yes, we are still in debt. We are in as much debt as we were 12 months ago. Instead of owing £32million to Aviva and Barclays Bank, we now owe the money to the Marcus Evans Group instead. Which is fine as long as he doesn’t call in the debt. Or sell the club to someone who will (one condition of his purchase is that he cannot sell Ipswich Town without selling the debt, or what is left of it, to the next buyer of the club). And, considering that we are now eight months on from his purchase, we must know what his intentions are, right?

Wrong. Even now, we still don’t know what Marcus Evans looks like. He hasn’t sat in the director’s box for a game. He has been to a game, but sat elsewhere. He didn’t attend the EGM where the vote was taken as to whether his purchase would be successful. He hasn’t made a single public comment since he bought the club. His only contact has been a letter sent to the Ipswich based Evening Star newspaper in November last year. None of the three directors of the club who represent him has made a public comment. Ipswich Town 1st, the Independent Supporters Trust for Ipswich Town fans has written to Marcus Evans seeking an audience with him or his representatives, yet – despite helping the club and the academy out financially during the club’s bleakest times – have not even received the courtesy of a reply.

The only suggestion that Marcus Evans has made in terms of how the club will be run during his tenure, or his motives and plans for the club, were that the club would continue to run as normal. Since that time Finance Director Anna Hughes has left the club, and David Sheepshanks’ paid Chairman position has now become a non-paid, non-executive role, and no longer has an office at the club. The latter only happened effective 1st July, and reading between the lines of certain statements made by the club, the suggestion is that it was a Marcus Evans decision, rather than one made by David Sheepshanks. Sheepshanks has worked for the club as chairman (full time, part time, paid and unpaid) for 13 seasons, so it clearly isn’t “business as usual”. Other than the changes made at board level, we have no idea what will happen in the future. What the plans are for the club, and what our mystery new owner has in store. While understanding his right to a private life, and wanting his privacy, one does not lose the right to privacy by communicating through written media, or even by allowing representatives to make public comments on your own behalf. Football club owners who have great plans are visible, and communicate to their fans. Do those who hide behind anonymity have something else to hide?

At least in the case of Ipswich Town, should everything go pear shaped with Marcus Evans, there is a Supporters Trust, that could follow in the footsteps of clubs elsewhere in the country who have stepped into the breach and take over the club. The Ipswich Supporters Trust have a small shareholding, enabling them to ask difficult questions at future AGMs, as they have done in the past when the need has arisen.

The number one aim of a Supporters Trust is to build up a shareholding of their club, not sign it away to people who do not even have the courage of their convictions to be named, and certainly not sell it to those who do not even have the respect for the fans to even outline their plans, and spell out their intentions.

As long as a Trust has a shareholding in a club, it has a voice for it’s members, for it’s club’s fans. If the Swiss-based trust were so interested in the fans view of the club, would they not seek to work together with the fans and the Trust? Combine their votes, rather than buy them outright? Put the £1million into the club, rather than a bank account of a Trust, which will just sit there gathering interest and dust, but serve no real purpose to anyone. Instead, the new owners are effectively being given a free pass to take ownership of the club, and do whatever they like. And if it all goes wrong, who takes the blame? Dave Allen? Geoff Hulley? John Hemmingham? Keith Addy? Geoff Sheard? Or the people that signed the rights away to a group of people they wouldn’t recognise by sight or by name? Think of the votes as “Should Wednesdayite go against the principle of a Supporter’s Trust and be allowed to sell their shares” and “Should Wednesdayite become voiceless and sell their shares to the nameless?”. Please, for the sake of Sheffield Wednesday, vote NO and NO, and keep the shares of the fans in the hands of the people who care about your great club more than anyone else.

Geoff Sheard’s lawyers

There has been a lot of speculation about Geoff Sheard’s lawyer. He is apparently ‘unavoidably absent’ until the 11th of August, which might be a problem given the seven day deadline apparently set today by Hulley and Addy for their lawyers to sit down with Sheard’s and establish proof of funds.

It did occur to me that there is something else that doesn’t feel quite right about this lawyer.

As it stands currently, despite all reasonable efforts, our legal advisors have been unable to confirm the standing or status of any necessary funds and have not been able to ascertain any details about the members of the consortium or indeed the standing or status of the bidder’s lawyer.

The only record we can find about him is that he appears to have been appointed to the European Court of Arbitration for Sport in the early 1990’s but we have been provided with no other details about his current status.

I can’t find any mention of a European Court of Arbitration in Sport. There is a Court of Arbitration in Sport, that has worldwide jurisdiction, offices in Australia, the USA, China and Switzerland, but I cannot for the life of me find a European version. It could of course be an honest mistake, but it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence about the veracity of the rest of the information contained in the documentation.

Yorkshire Post: Wednesdayite members set to vote on future of shares

Wednesdayite members set to vote on future of shares

The article states that major shareholders Geoff Hulley and Keith Addy are meeting Geoff Sheard today. It appears that the shareholders will demand more information than is currently available before selling, and it is very odd that Wednesdayite members are voting in the absence of this information.

The club, who have debts of £27m, released a statement last night acknowledging Wednesdayite’s intentions.

“The board welcomes this development and looks forward to the outcome of the ballot with interest. The board continues to be open to dialogue with any potential investors and to working to develop any acceptable proposal such that it can be presented to the Company’s shareholders for their consideration.

“Any general offer for the entire share capital of Sheffield Wednesday Plc would be subject to the rules of the Takeover Code. Accordingly, on receipt of any offer proposal, the board is obligated to understand the source of the related funding and the wider strategic plans for the company and its employees. While certain discussions are still ongoing, there can be no certainty that a formal offer to shareholders will be forthcoming.”