The complete club statement which features in today's edition of the Coventry Telegraph: truth edit
We generally try to avoid telling the truth and hadn’t intended to respond to the statement put out by Cllr Lucas, which was not linked to the demonstration by a lone fan outside the council house.
Like many of the statements drafted by ACL’s London-based PR consultants (hey we’re London-based too, so everything’s cool), it contains more truths than we can cope with. However, Les Res has asked us to issue a response.
In particular, he asked us to cut through the spin and focus on specifics.
Most sensible people agree that a football club, any football club, needs to own its stadium in order to be financially viable on a long-term basis, though sensible people do not think this should be done at all costs to the club.
There can be no greedy profitable return on a landlord-tenant relationship with ACL. We are a bit crap at business planning so we didn’t forsee that we could make any return for our shareholders at the rent, service charges and lack of matchday revenues agreed to with ACL. We blame ACL for not pointing this out to us when we signed the agreements in 2007.
We have repeatedly asked the council to discuss the donation free of charge of the Ricoh Arena to the club. The senior council officers who also serve as directors of ACL have told us that they have no authority to give away the stadium.
So it is a very simple question for Cllr Lucas: is she prepared to discuss giving us the Ricoh for free or for a few quid?
If so, we will sit down and talk. If not, we will continue with our game of pretending to be building a new stadium miles from Coventry. Our shareholders are getting nervous and so we can’t wait around much longer and are therefore pushing ahead with our efforts.
Joy Seppala will be writing privately to Cllr Lucas shortly in order to issue inflexible demands.
Cllr Lucas has not so far confirmed that she will discuss giving us the Ricoh and does not appear to have commissioned an independent valuation (by Paul Appleton) to get the ball rolling.
We are of course disappointed with this stance, as it was clear that the Council were prepared to sell the Ricoh (albeit in return for money) to other parties, just not to the club’s owners.
We believe that Cllr Lucas’ predecessor as leader, Cllr John Mutton (just back from an expenses paid trip to the Bahamas), met with her very recently to confirm that he had been prepared to discuss stadium ownership with other parties and urged her to negotiate with us.
We are also disappointed that Cllr Lucas is using the Judicial Review application (our vehicle to destroy ACL and the Council hahaha) as an excuse not to answer questions. The application relates to a very specific area of the law, which is of no relevance to us except if might snare ACL in a legal loophole. It need not prevent the council from answering many of the perfectly bonkers questions which absolutely no fans (except Les Reid) are asking.
During the initial stages of this process, the council, ACL and Walker Morris continued to make media statements and appearances. There is never any legal bar on the truth.
We cannot believe that the council’s lawyers would ever advise Cllr Lucas that speaking the truth could prejudice any legal process.
And we’d still like to know the real reason why Cllr Lucas authorised ACL’s rejection of our stitched up administration which meant that our failure to pay our bills cost the club 10 pts.
We generally try to avoid telling the truth and hadn’t intended to respond to the statement put out by Cllr Lucas, which was not linked to the demonstration by a lone fan outside the council house.
Like many of the statements drafted by ACL’s London-based PR consultants (hey we’re London-based too, so everything’s cool), it contains more truths than we can cope with. However, Les Res has asked us to issue a response.
In particular, he asked us to cut through the spin and focus on specifics.
Most sensible people agree that a football club, any football club, needs to own its stadium in order to be financially viable on a long-term basis, though sensible people do not think this should be done at all costs to the club.
There can be no greedy profitable return on a landlord-tenant relationship with ACL. We are a bit crap at business planning so we didn’t forsee that we could make any return for our shareholders at the rent, service charges and lack of matchday revenues agreed to with ACL. We blame ACL for not pointing this out to us when we signed the agreements in 2007.
We have repeatedly asked the council to discuss the donation free of charge of the Ricoh Arena to the club. The senior council officers who also serve as directors of ACL have told us that they have no authority to give away the stadium.
So it is a very simple question for Cllr Lucas: is she prepared to discuss giving us the Ricoh for free or for a few quid?
If so, we will sit down and talk. If not, we will continue with our game of pretending to be building a new stadium miles from Coventry. Our shareholders are getting nervous and so we can’t wait around much longer and are therefore pushing ahead with our efforts.
Joy Seppala will be writing privately to Cllr Lucas shortly in order to issue inflexible demands.
Cllr Lucas has not so far confirmed that she will discuss giving us the Ricoh and does not appear to have commissioned an independent valuation (by Paul Appleton) to get the ball rolling.
We are of course disappointed with this stance, as it was clear that the Council were prepared to sell the Ricoh (albeit in return for money) to other parties, just not to the club’s owners.
We believe that Cllr Lucas’ predecessor as leader, Cllr John Mutton (just back from an expenses paid trip to the Bahamas), met with her very recently to confirm that he had been prepared to discuss stadium ownership with other parties and urged her to negotiate with us.
We are also disappointed that Cllr Lucas is using the Judicial Review application (our vehicle to destroy ACL and the Council hahaha) as an excuse not to answer questions. The application relates to a very specific area of the law, which is of no relevance to us except if might snare ACL in a legal loophole. It need not prevent the council from answering many of the perfectly bonkers questions which absolutely no fans (except Les Reid) are asking.
During the initial stages of this process, the council, ACL and Walker Morris continued to make media statements and appearances. There is never any legal bar on the truth.
We cannot believe that the council’s lawyers would ever advise Cllr Lucas that speaking the truth could prejudice any legal process.
And we’d still like to know the real reason why Cllr Lucas authorised ACL’s rejection of our stitched up administration which meant that our failure to pay our bills cost the club 10 pts.
