Hey Bignose, what's the latest with paying back the 10 million quid of local taxpayers' money?
Allegedly.....
Well the council £10.25 million loan was made to the Northampton ex-chairman, (let's call him "Bungle") who then did nothing very much with the money except hand over £8 million of it to a 2 man band company (won't print their names as they don't sound like people you want to mess with!! lets call them A & B....) who reportedly had little experience of project managing such a development. (Indeed it transpired as it was all coming out, that one of these 2 guys already had 42 companies wound up in his name at the same residential address in Hertfordshire!!!?? , which makes you question why did "Bungle" hand over this money to such people without doing the usual financial checks which cost £20-£30 or so?!?! (or maybe he did? or maybe it was all pre-planned?!) It was reported that A +B gave over £2 million of the money back to "Bungle" and his father as some sort of "fee". (Bungle's father it was reported recently was regularly in and out of Private Eye magazine in the 1980's for some very dodgy stock market dealings and striking deals with HMRC to grass up his pals when they tracked him down in Italy)
The design of the stand went from being a £10.25 million huge stand with conference centre, and hotel at the back, to the £3 million abortion that you saw on Saturday, which barely adds 200 seats to the perfectly functional stand we had there already, before Bungle demolished the stand about 2 years ago.
So very little, if any of that council loan money went into developing our ground, and the company (Buckinghams) who had started the work did not get paid. (We are using the same company now to finish the stand by the way, and they have built lots of fine stands over the country!!)
Bungle also reportedly took A + B to court and there was some kind of settlement (£800,000 was rumoured, but nobody was allowed to say anything about the case as there was a non-disclosure agreement) .....allegedly....
Bungle had reportedly put £6-7 million of his own money into the club over the last 12-14 years, (but he never once published how much the club received for any of a string of 8-9 very good players we sold on during those years) so nobody really knows exactly what went on, but the council loan money disappeared when it was given to A + B (the 2 man band company) and we don't know what happened to the £2 million "fee" which was given back to Bungle (and his father)
Bungle basically stopped paying everyone at the club around the start of September this season, and nobody got paid for 2-3 months, and nobody even knew where Bungle had gone as he didn't show up at Northampton any more.
C Wilder (our manager) gave an impassioned Churchillian speech on Youtube after we won 2-1 at Notts County last November (well worth a watch!) imploring and openly haranguing Bungle to sell the club as we were due in court to be wound up in about 1 weeks time over a £166,000 unpaid tax bill, and Chris Wilder had got his old ex-Oxford chairman pal (Kelvin Thomas) to try to buy the club (for £1!!!) to save it, but Bungle was stalling (it seemed like Bungle was just trying to get us liquidated) The speech worked because 2 days later, Bungle sold the club to our new chairman. Our new chairman had spent weeks and weeks thrashing out a deal with Northampton council that the council should take back some of the land around the stadium (to sell for development to recoup part of the money, and try to recover the rest from the .....allegedly....dodgy characters involved, namely Bungle and A + B) so when our new chairman took over the club, the £10.25 million debt was written off as far as the club goes. Our new chairman and his backers stated they would inject £1 million into the club for immediate usage (running costs, loan players to improve team, unpaid wages etc) and another £3 million to finish the stand and boxes etc.
.....allegedly....The Police have a team of around 20 people looking into the "missing funds" and it is anyone's guess as to whether they will find Bungle or Mr A or Mr B individually or jointly responsible for the missing amounts, or indeed none of those people at all..!! .....allegedly....
But surely £10.25 million cant just disappear into thin air?!?
Nobody can also explain how the council .....allegedly....kept loaning chunks of this money every 2 months or so, when clearly nothing seemed to be going on at the building site regarding the redevelopment of the ground, and the new stand. (Usually there would be inspections and way-points where further chunks of money are handed over when certain milestones have been reached in a large project like this, but it appears .....allegedly....that the council just kept handing over the money when nothing was getting built.) It was reported .....allegedly....that the council even continued handing over chunks of the loan money, even after Bungle had stopped making repayments on the interest on the chunks of money he had already received!!!?? Conspiracy theories abound, as you can imagine!!
The upshot is the club has no debt whatsoever now, and a forward thinking chairman who seems to know what he is doing, and who has a great working relationship with the manager. It was reported that the chairman and his backers are probably only investing for up to 5 years, maybe hoping to sell the club for a profit if they can get it up a couple of divisions? But hey, we still have a club to support, and that didn't look likely last autumn.....