Asked about the club’s huge reported debts when he left in January 2002, he insisted: “Can you imagine a club like Coventry being allowed by its bank to get £59m in debt?“There is no way; it’s impossible. The day I left, our overdraft was £7.3m which was within our limits at the bank.
"The only other debt we had was money owed to Geoffrey Robinson and Derek Higgs and there was £10m to Robinson which had to be invested under his instruction on buying players – we couldn’t use it to pay wages or interest or anything else at all – and the same applied to Higgs which was about £2.5-£3m, so if you add all that up it was still only about £21-£22m.
“But the money from Higgs and Robinson was meant to be soft, long-term loans to the club because they were passionate supporters and directors.
"The only money that was absolutely on the line was the money to the bank and all that other stuff was a load of rubbish so I have no idea where they got that figure from.
"They took the transfer money that was due to go out and never took the transfer money in that we got, which was far, far greater than anything we ever had going out.
“If you look at when we sold John Hartson, Moustapha Hadji, Craig Bellamy and Chris Kirkland – there was a whole string of them that had to go – all of those came back in against any money that was due out, but they never took that in.”
Richardson left the club at the end of January 2002 and little more than three months later the balance sheets for the year ending May 31, 2002 – the club’s first year down – showed the net debt had been slashed by more than half to £27.8m, a figure that was actually even lower at around £23m due to the sales of Lee Hughes, Magnus Headman and David Thompson.
Before he was ousted, Richardson had made £22.5m for the club by selling Hartson, Bellamy, Hadji and Kirkland, but it was successor Mike McGinnity who was applauded by shareholders at the club’s AGM in December later that year.
Richardson added: “I did an agreement with them (the board) that they could carry on and we would have no further dealings and as you know I have never made a comment from that day to this.
"That was the arrangement and they broke every rule in the book and came out with all sorts of rubbish to try to justify their own position, but the worse thing was they didn’t know what they were doing for Coventry City or the fans. It was absolutely outrageous.”
