TOPIC: The Billionaire - How to move it forward

Assuming all want the billionaire story put to bed, has anyone thought of contacting David Conn or Charlie Sale, journalists at the Guardian and Mail, who love nothing more than digging into and publishing footballing shenanigans?
Conn in particular has unearthed loads of stuff on such matters, and was a big factor in Leeds fans putting big pressure on Bates and his crooked ways. Sale is a bit more gossipy, which might serve better.
Might be best put by someone rational (not Mullen then) and no allegiances to the club/Trust (sorry Deano).
Both are on twitter

Are you not rational or in the Trust or both?

Questionable on rational, but nowt to do with the Trust.
Would suggest it is someone who knows the facts (or the majority of them).
I only know what I read on here.

Fair enough.

You seem to have thought about contacting them... why don't you do it? Shouldn't take you long to contact them via twitter.

May be good exposure in the long run and could alert any would be investors/ takeovers.

Chuff me Northumbrian, it was only a suggestion. As I have already said, I do not know enough about it, but many seem to.
So many threads on here saying something should be done.
Quite a few make suggestions (the banner being one of the latest) and all folk do is snipe and make smart arse comments.
Makes you wonder whether some have the owners they deserve.

CarlisleWhite wrote: I was just taking the piss CarlisleWhite, don't worry. Just getting in there with the inevitable comment before somebody else did It's actually not a bad idea to contact a National journalist... not sure how much interest they'd have, given the size of the club... but anything with a fictional billionaire should be worth them looking at at least.

Well, he's been asked and he's replied asking for more details and says he'll have a look...


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Well done mate, just seen it - superb stuff

Let's hope he bites now and really goes to town on them. Seeing Nixon and Pattison squirming in the full glare of the national media spotlight would be absolutely superb....no gang of heavies in the car park to protect him then

Have a look back through some of the N&S; coverage. Send him links to the main developments/chronology. He'll prefer to work from proper sources rather than a rambling email from a disgruntled fan.

A few good ones to start with. Some of Jon Colman's recent articles in particular are very good, and will show that the local press are already onto this nonsense, which should hopefully help him realise there's something in this...

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/32812171

www.newsandstar.co.uk/carlisle-united/la...utd-owners-1.1220512

www.newsandstar.co.uk/carlisle-united/jo...-was-right-1.1221522

www.cumberlandnews.co.uk/news/carlisle-u...e-investor-1.1221437

www.newsandstar.co.uk/carlisle-united/jo...illionaire-1.1224987

No worries.
Conn was all over Stockport and Luton, among others, from memory, so sure Carlisle fits the bill.
I also think the fact the story is so farcical would be of interest.
Surprised AL or Lummy (or Mullen) have not done it already.

I have to admit I'm genuinely in two minds with this. I really want the idiots shown up for the liars that they are, and I want the club to be run properly from top to bottom, with the fans treated respectfully and properly. But I don't know whether I'd want to see the whole club dragged through the mud because of those clowns and their ridiculous lies.

I can quite easily understand how it can be seen as the last resort, because frankly nobody in Cumbria has been able to get any sort of sense out of them and it just seems as though they're going to carry on regardless with their heads buried in the sand. I can't help feeling it won't be Nixon who comes out of all this looking bad if it goes national.

On the whole I think I hope the guy runs with it, and gets it right, and the dinosaurs are forced out.

I guess Lapping didn't do it because it could have seemed like sour grapes.

Good work, fella's. Hopefully this bloke will do some digging and shame the custodians. All Jon Colman seems to have put out over recent months is stuff we already know....

ChampagneSupernova wrote:
Those when read together are quite a damning indictment of the people in charge at the club.

Moorlad - see where you are coming from here, but fairly sure they have not done anything illegal or even immoral, so it is not as if the club can get in bother.
Other teams with this sort of approach (such as Blackpool, Leeds, Hereford, etc) had much more to lose, as flagging up the activities of their owners could have resulted in all kinds of penalties.
It seems a fairly harmless way of making them squirm to most people's desired position of pushing them out.

If they're aware of this, I bet there's some sweat dripping down someone's big square head today!


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Desperate times now Moorlad.

Good crack this, a journalist from one of the bigger papers will have more experience in doing this kind of thing without having to worry so much about Agar's solicitors. They'll be more sure of what they can publish and when and won't give in to threats so easily.

Keith, Nixon, Jenkins and Patti. I know yous read this or have cronies reporting back. We are onto you.

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I get the feeling that somehow Nixon will use his FL connections to come out of this quite clean with little damage done to his reputation he seems to hold with the powers that be.

I'm now convinced that fella is made of teflon.

the Billionaire - How to move it forward.

find a billionaire who is interested in owning a tinpot 4th division club and ask him nicely?

David Conn was approached months ago by someone I know, not sure if he acted/had enough to look at. He's aware of goings on, so this could be a nice little push...

How can it be anything other than a good idea. If there is any truth in it then a good national journalist would find it and it would be quite a story
Far more likely is exposing the sham and highlighting those who have made fools of us all for over 3 months.

Yes the club could be a laughing stock. ..again. ..but we are already because of this so why not bring it to a head and be done with it.

Has anyone any news as to why dick young and Lord Clarke were made to leave the board?

bruntonpete wrote:
They haven't left - they're still on the operational board, for now anyway.

Were they not being asked to step down? I hope they remain. Need more decent people like them at the highest table.

bruntonpete wrote:
Originally I think that was the plan yes, but it didn't happen.

cufcdeano wrote:
Again, how strange. No explanation as usual.

As the Lapping deal is dead, keeping the pretence up seems strange. They could quietly put it to bed - it's achieved it's purpose.

Following a chat with one of the guys involved in the Lapping deal it seems everyone knows it's bull and now it's all about the BOD trying to save face and find a way to break the news without it coming back on them. Which fits in with JN trying to get KA to admit it was all made up. Good luck with that one.

As Matt says, they have to be looking for some way to salvage some of their reputation from all of this. Impossible I think, there are too many people around who have known it was a load of cack right from the start. It is absolutely self evident that it was only ever a ploy to remove the threat of Lapping.

It's to be hoped that at the end of this farce, that Lapping can put together a package with serious backing, that can mount a hostile takeover to finally rid us of the cancer that is the present owners.
Although given the lack of protests by the fans attending games are there enough fans who give a toss about who does or doesn't own the club.
The ones who really care are the ones who have given up after following the club for years.

What on earth would have been wrong with Jenkins/Nixon just saying "Look Andrew we've had second thoughts here and we've decided we want to keep things as they are for the time being. We'd like you to continue to work with us for now as your ideas are good but we want to maintain our status quo in terms of shares".

Why the hell make up a billionaire instead? What kind of people think this way?!

This is not a public limited company so there is absolutely no possibility of a "hostile takeover", unless by that you mean gan out and punching people until they hand their share certificates over. None of the shares of the holding company are available for trade on the open market.

Hostile takeover was the term used by Lapping when referring to the Hartlipools takeover not my own interpretation, whatever is the correct term for taking the club over and not just investing will do.

pacirv wrote:
The Hartlepool Company structure could well be different, but here at CUFC, if they won't sell, that's it, they stay.

Why the hell make up a billionaire instead? What kind of people think this way?![/quote]

Idiots mate, idiots think this way!

You'd think for the size of his square head Nixon would have a couple of brain cells to knock together wouldn't you? Jenkins has lost it completely and Pattison, well, we all know he's proof evolution can go in reverse.

What Bluestblue says is right.

The shares are not traded in either the holding company or the football club. There are only limited shares in the football club anyway because the (vast) majority of the shares in that company are held by the holding company (hence the name). So the only possibility of getting somebody involved is to issue more shares in the holding company, thus diluting the holding of some owners in the holding company (the trust was partly Lapping's plan), or one or more of the current shareholders actually wanting to sell their shares.

The problem with Lapping's plan wasn't with the shareholding, it was actually with voting rights, no individual was going to be able to control more than 24% of the voting rights of the holding company. So regardless of how many shares Nixon and Jenkins owned (after Pattison had been sidelined) they'd only have 48% of the vote on board matters at holding company level. Lapping's consortium however was not an individual, so he could command all their votes, and along with the trust's reduced shareholding he would have had a controlling voting interest.

I don't believe Nixon realised this at first, then when he did he shit himself which is what led (partly in any case) to the invented billionaire.

A Jenkins 585,050 (24.9%)
J Nixon 196,025 (8.3%)
S Pattison 28,025 (1.2%)
The United Trust 280,034 (11.9%)
New investors 1,260,000 (53.6%)

Under Lapping's plan that was the shareholdings with the voting rights percentages in brackets. As you can see I was wrong, and even without the trust Lapping had the majority voting rights.

I believe that when Nixon realised that he and Jenkins together would be completely superfluous once Lapping was involved, he must have decided the bid, whether in the interests of the club or not, was not in his own best interests. He had to get rid of Lapping as a threat to his control of the club. Step up Mr A, who was able to put Nixon in touch with an agent who Nixon knew and trusted who was willing to tout the club around and probably said he knew some foreign billionaire, or an agent for such a person. Obviously this was a straw Nixon felt able to clutch at, so he got the information out there that there was in investor waiting in the wings. Quite clearly this has been disastrous for them, because Lapping - whether right for the club or not - had the media onside, he had a large proportion of the fans onside, and the trust were even prepared to dilute their shareholding for him.

The trouble with what Nixon was doing was that he'd said there had been no interest from anybody for years in buying the club, so for 2 to come along almost at once seemed far fetched at best. Then when anybody reasonable started to think about why any billionaire would want to invest in a tinpot outfit at best, without getting any sort of control, it just starts to look downright ridiculous.

He's been floundering ever since looking for a way to back down and save face, but there's no way round it. We know the crack, he just has to face up to it, and get out and leave the club alone.

pacirv wrote:
That'd be "giving the three stooges enormous piles of money so they're happy to leave"

orfc wrote:
Yeah, and one of the things we'd all do well to remember is that they paid a pun each for their shareholding in the holding company, and Jenkins has since taken on David Allen's shares, I doubt he paid what they were worth then either. So the balance sheet value of a company is the shareholders funds, so the holding company's balance sheet value divided by the total number of issued shares is the value of each share, multiply that by the number of shares held and you get the amount of the company owned by a particular shareholder.

The point of that last paragraph is this, I would be willing to bet that if you worked out what amount of the company Jenkins owns, in monetary terms, it will be more than he has "loaned the club together with what he's paid for his shares. So he is massively still in profit and as for Nixon and Pattison, well their investment is clearly a good one.

We're meant to believe that the club owes Pioneer money?

Bollocks.

Correct Moorlad, I think it was huge miscalculation by Nixon. Jenkins I think probably stopped understanding decades ago. Lapping however for a very small financial input would have had a huge influence over the club.
Kicking Blue Yonder into the long grass so publicly was what in my opinion killed the deal for Fred, and Nixon.
Incidentally when does the confidentially clause for the 'lock out agreement' expire. Will we be told who the secret builder was?

I don't know much about Blue Yonder at all, and I also know very little about enabling developments either, never having dealt with one before. I always found it ridiculous that the idiots thought there would be any company in the world willing to part with £20m to build and give away a stadium, on the outskirts of Carlisle, just because they might get a chance to build a shop next to it.

I thought the lock out agreement was supposed to be over quite soon actually.

Moorlad wrote:
It was Jenkins who was put in touch with the agent but otherwise correct. Nixon got on board with it and both fell into the trap.

Moorland

Just like to say thanks for you last few posts. Never been able to fully get my head round some of the terminology, what and how, shares, takeover, etc. You have managed in a few posts to sum things very well and in an understandable way

Thanks

No problem mate.

I may have simplified some of it, but that is the general gist of it.

Moorlad, you are spot on with what you say about there being no interest for years, then all of a sudden two come along at once, but weren't they approached by a Maltese consortium also? All around the time of the petition and fans were being really vocal about wanting them gone from our club. Since Lapping came onto the scene, the pressure on them died down, and the billionaire was there way of keeping the fans off their backs, and kicking Lapping into touch, but it has backfired massively, because they never took into account the fact that our fans are not imbeciles.

In summary then, there are only 3 real ways of getting the clowns out.

1. They choose to sell
- Never going to happen

2. The team goes into freefall, out of the league, starts losing money hand over fist, probably ends up in administration, and they end up with no choice but to go
- More likely than (1), but the last option we'd want - not just because that scenario would threaten the very existence of the club, but also because it could then get picked up by quite literally anybody...at least in the current situation, only people with a genuine interest and ability in taking the club forward (such as AL) would probably consider it worth the effort and expense

3. They are forced out
- Either by fan pressure (and you'd be talking proper co-ordinated boycotts, deafening chanting, major protests etc) - again highly unlikely - or from some external force, such as major hounding from the press or something.

Sadly I think no. 2 is by far the more likely, probably once Curle's had enough and hauled anchor. No. 3 could be brought about if this David Conn fella shows enough interest, although I'm not holding my breath on that one.