bobsmyuncle wrote:
I understood that the £1,250,000 lease sale paid off the Bank and the RFL loan.
We still owe £250,000 for vat on that and the tax on Image Rights so the money didn't go there.
What other debts were so desperate for payment that the Pledge told us we must raise money immediately or face extinction?
Fantastic response from all Bulls fans but - Where was the money spent?
And why are we still in a financially sh*t position after this effort?
Let's be real - £1/2M is a seriously ginormous amount of money to disappear into a black hole.
So where did it go?
The black hole -I have been calling it that for three months now - predates the pledge.
The RFL loan was apparently 700k. The club received 1,500k including VAT (most still outstanding) for the lease sale. That means we had 800k available, even after repaying all of the loan that for some reason the club overlooked telling us about. Plus we had the money from the season ticket sales -or should have had.
The 500k pledge was supposedly to replace the overdraft facility and the half (?) of the RFL loan that was repaid much earlier than they say they expected. That would then enable the Jan and Feb PAYE and the April salaries to be paid, around 300k in total, and we presumed a big dent in the VAT.
So that suggests the 800k should really have been maybe 1,150k. Plus the season ticket monies.
Yet that lot seems to have just disappeared. The black hole, as I have called it.
So where the hell did it go? Possibilities include:
- simply paying the salaries and other running costs from around October; on the assumption that other income was far far less than ongoing costs;
- paying off some other loans or liabilities we were unaware of (maybe including the last lot re Harrisgate);
PH has said he was told by the club's auditors (wtf was the club's financial controller playing at if PH needed the bloody auditors to tell him the 2011 results, not her?) that the club made 250k (IIRC) profit in 2011? If that included 1,250k profit on sale of lease, (no book cost, remember) than that would mean an operating loss for 2011 of about 1m, would it not? If that is right, then it would suggest that the "losses of 100k/month" the new lot have referred to may not be as far fetched as many assumed? And that therefore the club's finances were totally unsustainable as they were?
Everything to me is pointing to a business that was hopelessly short of income, where the only way of cutting operating costs was by seriously hacking the playing staff budget - since what the hell else was there to cut?
This does all, unfortunately, lend credibility to the few bits the new lot are choosing to release about the cash requirement being larger than expected. Not to pay past bills but to pay ongoing operating costs.
I have repeatedly asked where the balance of the lease sale money - and the VAT on it - went, since to me that is crucial to a proper understanding of what the hell happened. I had already written off most of the 2012 season ticket income as being used to keep the club afloat in Q4 2011, which would itself have been a massive issue. We will never now know if the previous lot DID have a viable business plan in place and realistic expectations of income to plug the funding gap. All we know is that we bought some time. But from the sort of numbers being talked about or that one can deduce, The ongoing costs less income funding gap may be so large that at best we can look forward to a future of mediocrity.
And probably not at Odsal.
That is the best I can deduce from the available information.
