Genuine question - how many companies is Hood a current director / owner of? and what became of the ones in the past? has he a proven track record?

I can own as many companies as i wish to regiuster, but it doesnt mean I am a good business person.

Could the Harris pay off have been avoided if the club post 2006 had the balls to see it out??? again, more questions than answers. We will never know.

I know that Chris Caisley can be, and has been, and will again be, a total prat. However, he has never pretended to be mr nice guy. He's got one hell of a hard head in terms of his approach to many things. but you know where you are with him.

With Hood, I cannot trust him anymore. He has misled people for too long. Both Caisley and Hood blame each other and they are both right. It's their inability to work together that is crioppling the club, not the harris saga or the perceived lies!

My recollection of the figure Leeds had sued for was (a reported) £3m, and the reason the club caved in, as I understand it, was that if the judge were to have ordered the full £3m to be paid it would have bankrupted the club, and the directors would have, apparently, been considered guilty of negligence (maybe legally so, as directors do have some obligations to shareholders) and they couldn't risk this happening.

so the apparent end result, in a worst case scenario, is go bust then, versus go bust now?

as wayne bennett (no relation I am sure) titled his book "Don't die with the music in you!"

the only winners in a court case are the legal teams, and once you get to court they really rack up. Bear in mind you do not get all your costs back, so even if we won ie defended the claim there would be a cost. So the downside risk if we went to court was an unquantifiable but almost certainly massive bill and the upside a small bill with the answer somewhere in the middle, as against an exact and maneagable cost by coming to an agreement before court. Leeds probably did a similar calculation and came to a similar conclusion, that they probably would not make the +£3m stick and the costs of getting much less were too high, so again a small but defined amount was a better option, hence a settlement.

To me the unanswered question is who advised us to go for Harris despite his contract, and why did their PI insurance not pay the bill ? Was it Walker Morris? an independent firm of solicitors? or more worrying did we get any advice?

I think the rationale was probably more along the lines of 'if you don't go bust now you live to fight another day', rather than the way you've presented it. Think of it as taking the view that discretion is the better part of valour, rather than going for the up and at 'em approach. Again, I seem to remember it was presented as something which, legally, under the constraints that directors have in relation to them being responsible for other people's investments, there was little choice about it.


To be honest, I thought very much the same as you at the time, in fact the idea that the Bulls had "cohersed" (sic) Harris to break his contract was always a load of tosh to me, and the fact that Harris' own legal bods didn't even think the contract was binding only added to that view, and Leeds certainly didn't suffer one iota because of it.

the same discretion applies to Leeds. Leeds could either go to court and get the alleged £3m claimed, or settle beforehand for £350K. they chose the latter as they knew that even if they won there was no chance of getting the money. So Leeds went for a settlement we could afford and common sense prevailed.

To me the unanswered question is who advised us to go for Harris despite his contract, and why did their PI insurance not pay the bill ? Was it Walker Morris? an independent firm of solicitors? or more worrying did we get any advice?'"

One thing I am struggling to get my head around is the speed of turnaround. On Thursday Bennett said we had three other options plus Caisley, when the content went to the programme printers Hood said it may be his last as chair because of the egm. Which would indicate that in the space of a couple of days all 3 other interests had dropped out.

or caisley managed to persuade enough of major shareholders to back him at EGM regardless of what happened with the other options.

But that is independent of whether they are still talking to the three other parties. If I was Hood (I would have limited my period as chair to 3 years then resigned and left Caisley holding the baby again) and still had a good chance of getting funders in, thats what I would be going to the EGM with. And the message has a hint of calling Caisley.

PS off topic but the Yorkshire Posts coverage is just so much more informative than the TnA, the Independent to the TnA's Sun. theres a lot of interesting stuff in this article and others:

[urlhttp://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/bradford-bulls/coulby-calls-for-clarity-as-bulls-continue-their-fight-1-4466587[/url

they both get the same press releases, YP just seem to do more with the material. journos dont beat me up for this please1

What is gradually emerging is a strange farce. Far from conspiring to bring down Hood and Bennet it appears that Caisley and the others stood by and did nothing primarily because they didn't want the job of running it themselves. The other shareholders and board members believed Hood and Bennett to be useless and their decisions to be wrong and further more having seen the figures, believed they were perpetuating a myth re:Harrisgate to cover their own failings.

They reconstituted the board, largely it would seem so as NOT to have board meetings because they argued too much and so, have neither backed the current board, nor removed them. Hence a series of capitulations. Caisley has even acted as agent some of the clubs players in transfers away from the club.

NO board should ever have tolerated such a situation where they clearly had zero support from the majority shareholding and martin is right when he says Hood should have stepped down. Whatever their failings the job was simply impossible in the circumstances. He should have stepped down when Caisley acted for Sam Burgess citing a ridiculous conflict of interest. Furthermore,NO shareholding should have tolerated a situation where the majority of shareholders believed the current board was making a hash of the job and actively perpetuating a smear against Chris Caisley. That they waited 20 months to do anything about the lack of a meeting says as much abouth them as Hood.

Whilst we've been arguing about plots and conspiracies what's actually been happening is a abject inertia. Hood not up to the job, the shareholders not up to doing anything to either help or end his tenure. What an absolute debacle.

Absolutely spot on. Altho' I do feel that Hood has been hogtied and hamstrung to some extent because of the above.