Coventry City FC: Bob Ainsworth keeps up the pressure
On the eve of his adjournment debate in the Commons, Coventry NE MP Bob Ainsworth has released all the documents that he has sent to The Football League and to The FA concerning Coventry City Football Club. He has also sent them to the Administrator/Liquidator of the Club, Paul Appleton.
As website Two Hundred Percent showed recently with a series of confidential official documents that they had obtained (this one relating to the remaining transfer fee for Gary McSheffrey), there was never any doubt about who was the owner of player contracts, memberships of The League and FA and other related contracts and documents.
It will doubtless once more throw questions in the direction of The Football League and their decision making over a period of some years, including the recent transfer of the League Share to Otium, a company which only recently filed its accounts, under threat of Directors being criminally investigated by HMRC – as reported recently in the magazine Private Eye.
Joy Seppala, who controls hedge fund SISU, who have been behind the crisis at the Club, came out fighting recently in an interview with a local reporter at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, further exposing her position once more as very much in control of events, despite never having taken the Football League’s Fit and Proper Test. Seppala is also known for being on the statutory City of London regulator, the Takeover Panel.
However despite this very public role, in the article Seppala was not in a conciliatory mood, demanding control of the Ricoh Arena, the ground that currently sits empty despite generous offers from owners ACL (which includes a rental agreement reputedly less than the current annual cost of renting Sixfields from Northampton Town FC.)
Just months into SISU’s masterplan to return within three years, crowds are hovering at just above 2,000, with barely a thousand Coventry fans making the near 80-mile roundtrip to Northampton. Despite the PR to the contrary, Tim Fisher and his colleagues appear to have little hope of securing an alternative site to the Ricoh anywhere acceptably close to Coventry, and that’s without the funding in place, much less the planning process.
Whilst Arena Coventry Limited are confident that they can run a profitable business without the Club even being there, Coventry City FC seem to be stuck in a downward spiral off the pitch, with estimated losses of around £150,000 a month despite the team being successful on it.