Coventry City: Questions & Deductive Reasoning (1 Viewer)

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Coventry City: Questions & Deductive Reasoning


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Coventry City


By Ian - July, 31st 2013There are now just three days left until the start of the new season, but still the future of Coventry City Football Club remains in the balance. After the end of talks yesterday which were aimed at getting Ricoh Arena owners ACL to agree to the CVA which will allow the club to exit from administration and secure the transfer of ownership of the club from, well, one part of the same body of companies to another, the standard response has been to suggest that this Friday is a deadline that absolutely, completely, utterly, must be met if the club is not leap headlong into the abyss. Quite why this should be is a little bit of a mystery when we consider that Football League rules seem to indicate that any further points deduction for remaining in administration would not be applied until the end of this season rather than as soon as a ball is kicked on Saturday afternoon.


More brinkmanship from SISU? Quite possibly. Such hard-ball tactics have long been a modus operandum for SISU, but a time has come when other interested parties are starting to push back against them, and chief amongst these of late has been the Member of Parliament for Coventry North East, Bob Ainsworth, who has been tabling Early Day Motions with regularity of late, presumably with the intention of seeking to bring the situation at the club to a wider audience. We’re not going to reproduce those EDMs in full here, but Ainsworth’s public pronouncements on the subject can broadly be boiled down to a handful of key questions which seek to shine a light upon the murky corporate waters in which SISU operate and how these square on what is supposed to be the governance of the professional game that the Football League is supposed to be responsible:

• Just what is Joy Seppala’s role at Coventry City? She’s not on the list of directors, yet she appears to be taking the decisions. Is that compatible with her role as a member of the Takeover Panel (a body whose main functions are to issue and administer the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers and to supervise and regulate takeovers and other matters to which the Code applies in accordance with the rules)?
• How does this apparent role as a “shadow director” square with the Football League’s Owners and Directors Test? Did she undergo one? If not, why not?
• If she is not a director of the football club, why was she (as has been reported) at the meeting with ACL directors?
• Is it true that the Football League were subjected to legal threats if they did not approve the ground-share? Have there been any other threats of legal action since then? And who were they made against?
• We know that Sky Blue Sports and Leisure, (the company that not only owns Coventry City FC Limited, now in administration, but also Otium, the proposed owners of CCFC Limited) is so late in filing its accounts that Companies House is investigating whether they should be prosecuted. Why is that? What could be stopping Ms Seppala from insisting that the accounts are filed?

Ainsworth, however, is not the only person who is expressing an interest in these matters, and interest in them is starting to spread beyond merely Coventry City Football Club itself. We have had sight of a twelve page dossier which fleshes out Ainsworth’s questions regarding two matters: firstly, a set of representations, backed-up with documentary evidence, which the Football League is being urged to take into account when considering the outcome of the administration of Coventry City Football Club Limited and the Administrator’s proposal to sell the club to Otium Entertainments Limited, and secondly serious concerns which are shared widely amongst football supporters up and down the country, at the need for radical change in the way football is regulated in England which highlights in particular the viewpoint that the way in which the Football League has so far dealt with the issues facing Coventry City confirms an increasingly widely-held view that legislation is required with respect to the governance of the game in this country.

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Skybluesquirrel said:

Sub.

200% are not most likely football fans first, writers second and thirdly have day jobs. They have put up before they would prefer people not to take the whole article and paste it on a forum. They are trying to direct traffic to their site by the quality of their writing. Posting it here means they get no hits and lowers their daily stats.

They do it for the love (at the moment). The only benefit as a blogger is you get to see how many people read your posts. Hours of research and typing into the small hours, for a bit of a boost when something is well received and viewed.

Can you just post a link to the post next time - or a link and a paragraph that makes a point particularly well?

Click to expand...

you mean the link thats at the top of the post above the article that was there when i first posted it ?? and i put the article there for people to read who can not open the link and i have edited the post so people have to go to the 200% link