You'd bring a tear to a glass eye Adey



I have followed your pompous wind baggery on the Bulls Forum with much amusement. From your previous slavish acceptance and promotion of the Bulls management official line,....your subsequent public and very full full apology for such an erroneous point of view,..... through your almost daily changes of opinion on who is to blame since your financial crisis became public. And now your quivering bottom lip is pointed in my direction!

Your heart's in the right place Adey, but it's time to face up to reality my chubby friend, and accept that whilst Bradford Bulls will certainly continue, it may be in a lower division for a couple of seasons.

And no, I wont s if that happens, although perhaps, if I moved to Keighley I might change my point of view.....

That apology is withdrawn, as I have since discovered that I was not lied to, and that therefore no apology was required. I made the mistake of jumping to a hasty conclusion - just like the likes of you did.

At least I will apologise if I am wrong. I would never expect the likes of you to. Especially if to admit you were wrong would run contrary to the version of events you would like to convince yourselves of.

People who delight in the misfortune of others are pretty poor examples of humanity, in my opinion. Fortunately, most Leeds fans I know are not in that category.

Yeah, but your view must have been pretty well obscured by those massive chips on your shoulders.

FFS Adey, when the news of the sale of the lease broke you were telling us that your 'sources' at the Club were assuring you that it wasn't cos The Bulls were in financial trouble but to merely see off predatory approaches to take over Odsal. Well that was truthful wasn't it? And, yet, you're still ready to accept the guff coming out of the Club as gospel? Unfortunately, you and the rest of the gullible souls out there are quite likely to be shortly getting a rude awakening.

Self serving Drivel and utter crap too boot!

Since ESL began, there has been rumour after unfounded accusation of hand outs being received by the London Club with never a shred of evidence. In 2005 your CEO tried to get us kicked out of the comp when there were no rules to allow the RFL to do so.
2012 and so far you've had a back handed bail out from the RFL under the ruse of saving your pit of a ground and now you've got the begging bowl out again 7 weeks later...

I symapthise with the fans, but not your BOD, CEO or anyone who attempts to apologise for their ineptitude and bad management.

I knew the club was in financial trouble. Patently obvious from the accounts, from seeing the RFL take a charge in January 2011, from the rumours leaking out of Red Hall, from the sale of Andy Lynch and from a host of other tell-tale signs.

As far as I could see, the club was facing the prospect of the only solution being purchase by someone like Parkin (I presume the "predators" that the RFL - not the club - referred to). Someone who seemed to be more interested in getting the Odsal site, and in using the Bulls to reduce the operating costs of real-target Bradford City. The outlook for the Bulls in such circumstances seemed to me poor. Very limited money made available, and death by a thousand cuts.

The RFL's purchase of the lease seemed to stymie that as the "only" option, protecting Odsal and at the same time providing immediate funds to stabilise the financial position and allow the club to settle the image rights tax and ride out the recession until the economic climate improved.

One day the role of the council in all this will maybe become more clear. I think most of us realised that they had no real appetite for any kind of development at Odsal, however it was funded and by whom.

It was obvious that the club had been advanced monies by the RFL - the 1/11 charge was evidence of that. The club never acknowledged that, same way as other clubs that received advances on monies from the RFL have never done so. No surprises there. The terms of the advances almost certainly precluded their being made public anyway.

I expected there would be some monies to pay back - Q4 is always very lean cash-wise, so it was a no-brainer. I was shocked when I learned the amount, since that showed the club was in far worse financial straits than even cautious me had realised. Don't forget, I've been ploughing a lonely furrow for years about the Bulls' dire financial position, in the face of so many fans assuring me it must not be so!

The club did not actually lie - the sale itself was not a bail-out. The bail-out had already happened with the advances (which, as I have said, were larger than I ever imagined). Disingenuous, maybe - and yes, by me as much as by the club - but reflecting commercial necessity, I think.

The sale seemed to be - and as far as I can see, remains - a win-win. The RFL received a strategic asset at what can only have been a distressed sale price - I did keep trying to suggest that it was likely to be a good deal for the RFL, but kept getting shot down - and the club was saved from Valley Parade and IMO eventual oblivion, or more immediate oblivion if they tried to stay put at Odsal.

Did the club lie to me? I cannot see that they did. Were they disingenuous? Without a doubt. Did I realise they were being disingenuous? Those who know me will attest to that. Was I shocked how bad the financial position really was, and therefore at the degree to which they had been disingenuous, albeit through necessity? Absolutely. Are there still unanswered questions about all this? Most definitely, and I listed a load out for reference for a meeting we have with the board in the next day or two. Do I think this Pledge business is the best way for everyone to solve the problem? Of course not; but in the time frame I have concluded it looks to be the ONLY way.

BUT...do I think that allowing the club to go into administration, seeing the back of the present 3-man board and the crazy shareholding stasis that is one underlying cause of the problems, would be a better outcome than trying to plug the current funding gap now and holding the inquest afterwards when matters are less pressing? In the absence of even the slightest hint of a prepack waiting in the wings, and given the massive risks of too many assets being lost for good in a protracted administration - no, I do not.

And that, my friends, is why I have formed the view that I have.

In 2005 you went into liquidation, taking the taxpayer for £1/2m in unpaid taxes. Bulls are trying to avoid doing precisely that. London, Crusaders and Wakey all took the taxpayer for large sums of unpaid tax. If this comes off, Bulls will not.

Our CEO in 2005 was Gareth Davies. You clearly mean our then-chairman, Caisley. Most people will be aware of my views on his stewardship over the latter part of his tenure. But the reason he wanted London kicking out was because of the unpaid taxes. His stated view was why should other clubs have to pay the taxes they have collected from employees, customers and spectators, when London could get away with it and thereby secure an advantage by rising immediately like a phoenix?

You will see in my post above that I say that anything is preferable in my mind to administration. Want to know one more big reason why? Because I would be totally embarrassed to support a club that had just ripped off the taxpayer. Write that down someplace, so that IF the Bulls should fall over, and IF perchance I am wrong and something DOES rise from the wreck, you cans see if I practise what I preach.

I also wonder just how the likes of you can know for certain that the Bulls' present situation is due to "ineptitude and bad management"? You are presuming that by responding to the symptoms. You can have no idea as to the causes. Bloody good job you are not a doctor.

........

If the Bulls need to get their hands on 500k or face admin, then how else has this happened other than through ineptitude or bad management?
Did the RL pixies steal away in the night with the money?

As for the doctor quip.......if the patient won't tell me the truth as to how they got ill, then I have little option other than to go on what I see.......and in this case, I see a club in financial trouble and I will call it as I see it!

Except the patient told you.

The bank called in the overdraft, totally unexpectedly. It looks like RBS, charged with de-risking and shrinking its balance sheet, took the opportunity to do a bit of just that. I know FOR A FACT that RBS have been seeking to get out of lending anything to RL clubs. And if I told you everything I know on this, from totally outside of the Bulls, you would no longer have any doubts, I suspect.

The RFL required repayment of an advance that the club believed they had the use of for the rest of the year. Quite WHY they did not tie the RFL down on something they seem to have relied on has not been satisfactorily explained, and on that score, even though they believed they had an agreement, they are probably vulnerable.

The figures for these have not been put in the public domain, but from the numbers I have been told are apparently considerably higher in aggregate than the £500k stated as being required urgently to plug the hole.

And I know, from hearing the view about both of these actions from the horse's mouth, just how angry they are about both. No club without a sugar daddy could withstand a sudden reduction of its cash resources on this scale. Probably in either hemisphere.

London has Hughes. Just imagine the consequences if you did not? Yet I do not hear you saying London have been financially mismanaged? I could say that any club, like London, that would go out of business the day the sugar daddy pulled the plug has clearly been financially mismanaged, since it relies on a funding source that could cease if it got hit by a bus/divorce/attack of the wobblies/whatever. Is that any more unreasonable than what you have accused Bulls of?

The patient told you what was wrong. You failed to make the correct diagnosis.

Full disclosure? I beg to differ.


Call it an overdraft, call it a loan, the bank has a duty to its shareholders and if the "debt" was seen as having been at risk, then they are within their rights to demand it paid.
I run a business and I do not rely on a bank loan, overdraft facility or a credit card......because I run my business well and don't spend what I can't afford. Neither to I spend on projected revenues..


As I said, withing their right to do so and the club were wrong to rely on access to this cash.



ineptitude maybe? Bad Management possibly?


So again the question arises, if this is all someone else fault, why not publish the FACTS?



I post daily that London is a badly managed club and possible the worst run business I have ever come across. We rely 100% on David Hughes and this is not a good recipie......it will end in tears, but as the song says...

"Who's sorry now?"


NOPE
It's like the patient telling me they have a headache but neglecting to tell me they got hit over the head with a cricket bat.............

.....I still don't know the amount, the reseoning behind not questioning the RFL and the Bank in their actions and why, after many years of being a debt free club, the patient finds themself in this position.

I think a lot of fans share those views. When Keighley had problems a lot of us were not happy bunnies over the outcome, not least because the clubs actions end up potentially stuffing local business that has supported them. I think the incoming board made a pledge to pay off "what they could when they could" but have no idea how that worked.