this is going to be a long one but can someone who's better with finance than me look at these figures and tell me if there's any chance of it adding up:
£8m - The agreements to former players to cancel their contracts, the trust are now saying these are valid and they will only pay £2m on the basis that those deals were agreed with Chanrai but surely they were agreed with the administrator so any new owner would have to honour them?
£2m - rumoured amount of football creditor claims (Kanu and 3 others), could be more though
£2.75m - 'war chest', apparently Chanrai had promised £4m but the trust are reducing that to £2.75m. Saying that all the players currently signing are the ones Appleton was moaning he wouldn't be able to afford if the budget was less that £4m.
£8m - to 'buy' Fratton Park. Chanrai doesn't own the ground but has a charge over it. He is said to want £8m (he is owed £18m by the club), it has been valued at £7.5m (not clear if that's as a football ground or not, value may rise if there's no club / ground) the trust are offering £2.75m and claim that Birch can force Chanrai to accept this through the courts (no mention of who will pay the cost of that)
£1.8m - cost of admin so far, this is going up by the day.
£1.16m - money owed to creditors through latest CVA, debt was believed to be £58m and they offered 2p in the £
That adds up to £23.71m. That's before ongoing costs of staffing, running the club etc
To cover that we have the following
£1m - major donors, not clear if this is already in the bank or not
£2m - supporter pledges, you only have to put down £100 of the £1K pledge so that's £20K in the bank.
£3m - cash in the bank supposedly, this must mean a parachute payment has been made
£8m - further parachute payment, assuming the £3m in the bank is from a PP
That's £14m assuming every pledge comes through. Turnover will need to be added to that but thats a shortfall of £9.71m, you can't count the council loan for 2 reasons, it's not likely to happen (league have refused to guarantee it which was one of the conditions) and it was supposed to be short term while the pledges were being collected so you can't count pledges and the loan.
To me that means if they can convince those players that have left to take 25% of what they were offered, can convince Chanrai to let them have the ground for a fraction of its value and not incur any more admin charges and every pledge comes through they are just about at zero but as they don't seem to be budgeting to break even looking at the players they're bringing in who will cover the new debts? Surely there's not a realistic chance of the trust taking control in which case how can they retain their golden share. We were being told if we didn't get the accounts in before the last league meeting we could be kicked out, doesn't seem very consistent.
There's also a divide growing between the trust and the fans, when you look at it they've only had 2000 fans pledge, pretty poor for the supposed best fans in the county. A lot of those that have pledged are now questioning why they still haven't seen a business plan or budget. There's also concern as the initial trust communications gave the impression that anyone who pledged would have a share in Pompey. The language has now been changed and it's now described as a donation to the trust to allow them to buy the club. People are raising concerns that the people being put in the top positions are simply those who have donated the most and they seem to want to use fans money to fund them buying the club and becoming the shareholders.
