More really to do with the Council no longer willing to pay for the upkeep of Odsal from 2003.

Accounts took a nosedive after then. Subsequent mistakes over Harris, keeping McNamara so long etc compounded matters.

There's definitely 2 types of screwups for Bulls over the last 20years.
There are missed opportunities - Tesco backed OSV plan for example, not focusing on academy early or intensely enough
And there are (what I will call) stupidities, decisions deliberately made by the board which were plain wrong. Harrisgate. The Odsal settlement, £60 season tickets, recruitment.

The way the league structures are set up now the only way out of the championship is to spend big and BUY your way out. If you haven't got a sugar daddy bank rolling you are not going anywhere. At the end of the season you have to have a team that has been playing part timers all year turn up and produce the goods on 7 or 8 occasions against professional clubs who have been playing higher quality opposition all year. The new structure now encourages the championship clubs who have superleague aspirations to roll the dice. Mark Green rolled the dice for 2 years and lost. Management has been poor and the squad massively underperformed last year. The match at Fev was a disgrace and the players on that pitch should have been ashamed of themselves.

None of this excuses the fact players were being signed after the defeat to Fev, some from overseas. Season tickets were sold and Green publically said the club would remain full time after the Fev defeat. Surely he knew the impact this would have. I did as I called it at the time like you did that there now was a massive black hole in the finances and trouble was ahead, the thing is the club just carried on regardless spending more money it didn't have and that lies with the man at the top. Ferres and RHP saw the iceberg and took to the lifeboats.

Isn't this what franchises sort to avoid?

Are we not getting a copy of the Administrator's Report, then?

[*]

What kind of screwup is thinking you can get away without paying VAT on season tickets?

I think it's down to selling them as memberships i'm sure thats what the argument was, I dont think you pay VAT or pay smaller amounts on sold memberships. Bit daft really when its plainly clear they were season tickets

Haven't we done this in years gone by when your ticket/pass got you discount at various places. In that time you could have said it was a membership as it gave you other benefits. However with the later version I think the only benefit was that it got you into matches and that is why HMRC classed it as a season ticket and not a membership.

On the face of it I'd agree but the law is a very strange beast sometimes.

To be fair, the idea that Green thought he didn't need to pay VAT because they were 'memberships' is what I understood the problem to be. When you think about it, having a club and allowing 'members' free entry and use of facilities isn't[i that[/i much different from the concept of season tickets and I can certainly see how the law relating to those entities might overlap in places.

Whether he just, 'didn't set it up correctly', or was 'bang out of order', might often need to be settled some arcane legal processes, I suppose. ...and what mood the judge is in!

The second type - deliberate stupidity

the VAT legislation is pretty clear that club memberships can have both vatable and non-vatable elements. The element relating to entrance to matches must have been vatable, that is described in words of one syllable in the VAT regulations, so the argument surely must have been about what value of membership to attribute to the non vatable benefits package and the match entrance element. The Vatmans default position will have been a split of 0/100% on the basis that it was a marketing incentive by the club not the purpose of membership. I would have sought the advice of a VAT consultant after checking his PI insurance before witholding large amounts of VAT on the basis of such an assumption of the split.

i'd suspect the membership pack freebies and member only votes on things like naming stands and bars plus talk about making some bars member only (although only superficially implemented) were an attempt to give extra value to memberships in attempt to increase non vateable percentage.

It was a scam, nothing more. He tried to con the revenue, deliberately. This was never going to work.
We've had previous owners who f*cked up through stupidity and ignorance, this time it was just devious.

There are lots of companies which deliberately 'scam' the tax laws though, mainly big multi-nationals, pretending they don't do business in this country. I'm pretty sure there is a basic attitude, in many people - in big business or otherwise, that taking the P out of the taxman is fair game. In the accepted knowledge that the big beasts get away with it, it's hard to take a moral line when the, 'little people', try to get away with it. The law should work for all, imo.