This might seem a bit long as a reply but I think it is worth setting out what happened.
As everyone will recall the Club under G Robinson was close to administration. The Co-op Bank had retained Kroll to try to find a purchaser who could settle some of the Club's debts and take it forward. Robinson had no choice in the matter.
There was then a carnival as a string of chancers came to Coventry. Some were more serious contenders than others. The situation was not helped by the lack of transparency in the Club's accounts nor the suggestion by Robinson that he owned the Option to purchase half the shares in ACL.
As potential investors did their due diligence and found more and more ugly things under the stones so they withered away. The Manhattan Group (introduced by Fletcher who, it was alleged,was on a success fee from both sides) was one such: when they had got enough information to make a decision they ran after a final meeting with Robinson late in the evening after a match when he had dined well in the boardroom.
At times it was farcical: two texans in jeans and cowboy boots flew in on the understanding that they could take over the whole thing CCFC, ACL, the freehold etc and finding that this was not quite so, turned and flew out again the same day.
The Group that Robinson refers to was the Windsor Group. This was run by Stephen Ives. He had been a partner in the accountants Deloittes but had been sacked and struck off as an accountant for fraud. The big claim from this group and Robinson was that not only would they stabilise the Club but that they would invest in regeneration projects in Coventry. In fact Robinson has been repeating this recently. The fact is that the Windsor Group had invested in Liverpool, had run out of money, were in dispute with Laing O'Rourke (who built the Ricoh) and were about to go into administration.
http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/...objectid=18893190&siteid=50061-name_page.html
Robinson said recently that the Windsor Group had put up a bond, in other words had lodged money as evidence of good faith in taking the deal to take over CCFC forward. This is quite untrue. At a meeting on the afternoon of 2 November 2007 Robinson together with Ives said that the Co-op Bank, with which Ives said he had done a lot of business, would provide proof of funding. Not quite the same as a bond but sufficient for the process to go forward. It was a simple matter to ask Kroll whether this was true. One of the main Board Directors of the Co-op Bank telephoned to say that it was not true and that in fact Ives had never had any kind of dealings with the Co-op Bank except once when they rejected his approach for a loan.
The three main planks of Robinson's preferred option were that the Windsor Group was a well-respected investment group run by leading and well-regarded professionals, that it had a strong record in working closely with local authorities in regeneration projects and that it had the money. All of these were false.
It did not take the Co-op Bank long to decide that the Windsor Group were not worth talking to. This was their decison, not the Council's.
When Robinson says that everyone would have been better off with them than SISU is true in one respect only: the deal Robinson would have got from the Windsor Group was better than the deal he eventually got from SISU.
