The Lounge

[Singapore Don]

Another excellent Colum, thank you. Your conclusion is spot on.

[onyadon]

Thanks Windlesham and Colum for excellent wraps of the DT SGM. This is a major dilemma for our club. The DT (Mark Davis) is clearly pushing for the outside investment option with a bulk of the fans calling for exhaustion of all funding possibilities. Read today that around 300 Dons Bond survey respondents have so far pledged an average of £3,200 each (nearly £1m in total already). It concerns me that maybe not enough has been done by the DT Board to investigate/exhaust ALL possibilities, including following up leads from within the Dons fan base for credible people with expertise in finance/broking and other areas to get this across the line. The Buckingham builders’ deadline for sometime January-February is also complicating matters, cutting down on the time hunting up on the various options, excluding the outside investment. I wonder if considering the gravity of the situation the DT should maybe consider co-opting suitably credentialled people to act as an expanded brainstorming ‘war cabinet’ to get through as many leads as possible to escalate the club’s efforts to seek a solution that would be agreeable to the majority of DT members. What is on the table at the moment does not inspire confidence for the future of the club’s governance further down the track by opening up even 30% of shares to outside interests. Interested in others’ thoughts/suggestions.

[Windlesham Don]

What I cannot understand (and I find it hard to believe that the DTB do not see this as a crucial question to be answered) is that we have been offered £7.5m by three so called ‘investors’ – they have no current or previous connection with the club and they are not willing to reveal their identity. How do they think they are going to make a return on their investment? We are a struggling League 1 club, losing £1m a year, we will never make a profit and their ‘investment’ is liable to disappear down a black hole if they are genuinely going to try and run the club as a going concern.

The only way that they are ever going to get a return on their investment is if they remove assets from the club and the only asset that we have is the freehold of New Plough Lane.

Thus, without any further information being provided the only logical conclusion is that these ‘investors’ are in fact asset strippers and another in a long line of crooks trying to get their hands on football club land. This would explain why they are choosing to remain anonymous for as long as possible…

The DTB must know this, but continues to protect the identities of these ‘investors’. If they turn out to be genuine then they are not losing anything by opening themselves up to questions, but they longer they remain anonymous the more suspicious I become of their intentions.

The clock is ticking and the only reason for these ‘investors’ to run the clock down is to force us into a corner where we have to agree to their demands. Is this the action of genuine investors..?

[Colum]

It was stated by the DTB on Monday that the three investors are well aware that they won’t see a return on their investment. Finding one multi-millionaire in Wimbledon willing to throw £2.5m down the drain seems implausible, but to find three?

I wouldn’t be surprised if any conversation with investors went along the lines of…

DTB: Help! We’re in serious doo-dah.
Investors: OK here’s £2.5m.
DTB: Thank you. Bye.
Investors: Whoa there! What’s in it for me?
DTB: What? You want something in return? We weren’t expecting that!
Investors: Yes we want 30% of your shares and equal seats on your board.
DTB: Oh. Well I guess that’s OK.
Investors: That was easy!

[Devon Womble]

Well said Windlesham.
From your words it is my confident belief that these three ‘investors’ are indeed asset strippers who have identified the club as a soft target.
If we are to prevent them taking over the club the first thing we have to do is REMOVE the current DTB. This, simply because they may well have been ‘persuaded’ to support whatever this ‘Gang of three’ want through their voting powers in the proposed new structure. That will cost us NPL.
With a new board to face, these Investors will have some hard questions to answer. If their intentions are indeed honourable, they will answer them. If not, then their identity as asset strippers will become apparent.

Candidly, on learning of our annual loss, I am also confident that there will not be, nor will there ever have been, a commercial funding offer. That we should be assured of.

I suggest our only hope is to labour on with a minimalist stadium and work on building a large enough fan base to inject the cash required to deliver the desired end result… This, of course, also requires an improvement on the pitch…

There endeth the dream? Possibly, but then, we are (still) Wimbledon… just.

[Colum]

Something has been bothering me since Monday, but it is only now that I’ve had the time to think about what it is. The DTB has approached AT LEAST three investors. It would be churlish to think that the first three that were approached all said “Yes”. If that is the case, who else was approached, what reasoning was used to do so, and why did they say “No”?

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