I'm a potential investor with a load of cash in my pocket.
Do I:
a) buy the club now and inherit all its debts, including the HMRC liabilities, or b) buy the business and assets through a prepack Administration and spend the cash I would have spent paying off old liabilities on the club's future
?
Guilfoyle is saying he couldn't fund a trading Administration (no surprise there given the losses and cashflow issues) - but that's not the same as saying Administation would not be the preferred investment vehicle for an investor.
One of the recent "strong rumours" touted on here was that someone, if not exactly a sugar daddy then at least someone with a few sachets of Sweetex, was going to be putting some money in a week and a half ago, (not an investment) there would be an announcement, and this would get us out of the immediate hole.
It joins the longish list of false rumours up with which we have had to put.
Whatever the truth of this one, the sad fact is that without significant and ongoing financial backing, whatever budget the new club (whether this one or some post-administration one - puts together, that will NOT be, in fact will be nowhere near, a budget that approaches being able to field a top class SL team. You can not make a loss, or you can have a top-4 team. You can't have both.
And before any clever dicks start quoting examples of clubs allegedly showing a profit in their accounts, all I can say is that Bulls fans should be the absolutely last people to ever believe that the published accounts are worth the paper they are fabricated upon, if what you want to know is whether the club is, all things considered, spending way more than it is bringing in. Accounts can show you whatever the accountants were told to show.
Indeed. Rather like government figures, carefully choosing the start and end dates of your statistics can make a world of difference
Indeed. Rather like government figures, carefully choosing the start and end dates of your statistics can make a world of difference
Yes, you can manipulate the profit and loss and balance sheet figures over a period of time, but as Adey said a couple of weeks ago, you cannot do it for ever, and it is usually the cash flow that tells the tale, or as Rick at the UB Management Centre was want to say in his book Modern Financial Management, "Profit is an opinion, cashflow is a fact". If income exceeds expenditure for any period of time, no cash. What the accounts tell us is that Caisley threw cash at the team, Hood had to get cash out of any asset he could.
Martin, did you do a summary of net cash flows year on year? Stripping out any major exceptionals? Occurs to me a nice little chart of that might be the most telling record of all?
What the figures DO tell us though, especially using the figures bandied about by Coulby these last few days, is that if we could have back all the money that Harrisgate cost us and which we have physically paid out in hard cash, there would be no crisis.
Above all else, and by a very long chalk, signing Harris has brought us to this.