Take over what Take Over

[scottf 21]

ive got that in writing now mate -im on carling

 

I already printed the screen

[alex3659 11]

I already printed the screen

 

we'll get bladebloke to come aswell.

[MR BENN 10]

we'll get bladebloke to come aswell.

 

no thanks -im choosy who i drink with:thumbsup:

[alex3659 11]

no thanks -im choosy who i drink with:thumbsup:

 

It's not that long ago you posted you would love to meet up with him.

Never mind I'm sure he has plenty of drinking pals .

[Robbie Loving 10]

On topic please guys.....

[al_partridge 10]

I've been away for a few days so haven't posted in this thread yet before it descended into the same old people with the same old squabbling, but just a few points.

 

 

Administration isn't the simple magical eradicating of debt and then starting afresh that some people seem to think it is. The administrator comes in and looks at what assets can be sold, and sells them at a knockdown price. So you can say goodbye to the likes of Grant, Beevers, Spurr, Wood, Simek, and possibly even the stadium as well. Some people (blades) may go on about us trying to "cheat the system" by asking creditors to reduce their demands, but at least we've spent a decade trading under the severe financial restraints rather than taking the "easy option" of administration long ago.

 

 

The majority of people who say that Dave Allen did a good job for Wednesday are blades. This sums him up. During his time as chairman, the club's debt increased from some £13m to £28m, despite his cost cutting. Our league position was similar when he came and when he left, the main difference was that when he came we had excellent gates. By the time he left, he and his cronies had managed to get thousands of them to stop coming, mostly thanks to his disastrous PR skills, including the legal action against fans who dared criticise him, banning of lifelong fans from the ground, the ridiculous away ID scheme which lasted for a whole 2 games, drastic and ridiculous price increases for the loyal fans, constant belittling of the club's fans and customers, petty squabbling and blaming of everybody else for everything that went wrong, and personally obstructing possible investment opportunities and blaming others for this as well. There are plenty of other examples. Overall, the man's tenure has been a disaster, yet he still expects to walk away with every single penny he put in and more.

 

Allen is playing silly buggers with this loan, but that's the kind of petty vindictive man he is. He'll have walked away with far more than this loan is worth when you take into account the interest he's made on his loans, and the cash made from his shareholding - yet he's willing to obstruct any investment just because he can. He's every right to demand full repayment, of course he has, but as a successful businessman he surely doesn't expect every business venture to be a success. Win some lose some. The other loan note holders have all showed willingness to write off some of the debt in an effort to move the club forward, but Allen has to have his petty act of revenge and stand in the way. It's curious that he was saying the other day that he wouldn't sell his shares to anonymous investors, yet seemed perfectly willing to do a deal with Geoff "cloud cuckoo land" Sheard.

 

How many other football chairmen who put money into their clubs even expect to get any of it back, let alone the full amount plus interest? He's also proved to be an obstacle to investment. He refused to let Ken Bates in, which pleased a lot of people, but I thought at the time and I still think now that we'd have been a lot better off with Bates at the helm. He's not a very nice man, his ethics are highly questionable, but he knows his football. Bates was prepared to invest £10m, which at the time would have just about halved the debt to a manageable level. After Allen refused to even speak to him, just slagging him off in the press, Bates took his £10m to Leeds, invested in the team, and took them from the bottom of the Championship to within one game of the Premiership. Fair enough, they then got relegated the year after (remind me which manager took them from the play-off final to relegation fodder?), but they're in an amazingly better situation now thanks to Bates' "dodginess" than they were, having wiped out a £100m-ish debt.

 

Then there were the Paul Gregg and Carson Yeung "takeovers", culminating in "that press conference". Allen basically sat there and blamed Wednesdayite for the deals collapsing, citing their 10% shareholding as the reason. Yet he even said at the pres conference that he'd told Gregg "don't deal with that lot, they're just troublemakers", or words to that effect. So Wednesdayite got the full blame for the collapse despite never even being approached about their shares! Geoff Sheard may have been a fiasco, but he went about things the right way in speaking to Wednesdayite, getting them to agree to sell their shares, and they weren't a problem at all, just as they wouldn't have been with anybody else, yet Allen's chip on his shoulder about them from was enough to break at least two investment deals (with hindsight, Yeung was a disaster at Birmingham, but the point was that Allen prevented the initial deal from happening).

 

Allen isn't the reason the club is in debt (Danny Wilson's blowing of millions on bad players and sky high wages got us into the mess), but his chairmanship left us in a far worse state than we were before. Strafford is picking up the pieces, I can't believe that some people are giving him stick when he's already done more good for the club than Allen & Co did in 6 years.

 

Sorry for the length of the post, but I wanted to make these points.

[Earwiggo 10]

In a nutshell Al.