The registration of the players was of no concern to ACL... All they should have been worried about was where their owed money was. Just a poor excuse to unnecessarily reject the CVA, further proving they couldn't give a fuck about the club.
Unless of course they were concerned about the admin process because they wanted to get hold of the club and the extreme rent was a measure to 'distress' the club.....?
I'm sorry Ian, but that's just plain wrong. The reason for rejecting the CVA was given, ACL thought it would legitimise a process that they saw as deeply flawed. The 'V' in CVA stands for 'Voluntary' - if a business can't satisfy its creditors for whatever reason they are under no obligation to accept the CVA. This was a business where almost all of the assets had been transferred, leaving only liabilities, seemingly with the express purpose of abandoning a lawful contract, the lease. The damage done to the club here lies with the people who chose not to pay their bills, and run their business in that way.
As for the 'using extreme rent to distress the club', again that's not borne out by the facts. Even Fisher and SISU accepted that the rent was driven by the mortgage. Claiming that the rent was being used as a way to get hold of the club is ridiculous, even SISU don't say that.
And this 23k break-even figure. That's an arithmetical nonsense.
If you want to work out how many people you need in the stadium to pay the rent it's easy enough. Divide the rent by the number of fixtures, then divide that by the average cost of a ticket. At 23 fixtures and £20/ticket you actually need less than 3,000 to cover the rent (even at £1.2m). Counting in the other running costs to claim a higher break-even makes no sense. You could just as well say our fixed costs (rent etc.) are £x, therefore to break-even our other costs (salaries etc) need to be £y. In fact, I think the latter way is how most businesses run.
To run the rent break-even argument as presented by you to it's logical conclusion, if we signed Ronaldo, Messi and Rooney at £300k/week you could imply a break-even rent where ACL would have to pay the club £10m a year or some such nonsense.
Regardless, this has been done to death - and I don't see how it helps to progress anything rehashing it. Either we're moving forward on a deal at the Ricoh, or we're not. Given ACL's very (and unnecessarily, imho) firm statement, SISU's seeming determination to stick with court action, and the FL's complete failure, it looks like at least another season at Northampton, and probably a few more too until one side or the other goes pop.
What a shambles.
