OWN GOAL:
SLOWLY the truth is emerging about how badly Coventry City Council has mishandled the saga of the Ricoh Arena, former home of Coventry City Football Club.
The stadium belongs to Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), which is owned half by the Labour council and half by the local Alan Edward Higgs charity. ACL has been locked in a battle with the club's owners, SISU Capital, which wants to buy the stadium. Relations are so bad that the club currently plays homes games 33 miles away, in Northampton.
In 2012 both the club and ACL were as good as broke, the club because ACL was charging it an unrealistic, crippling rent, and ACL because it was lumbered with an even more crippling mortgage on the stadium - all dating back to a lousy deal agreed between the council and the club's previous owners before the Ricoh opened in 2006.
SISU suggested a solution; it would pay off ACL's debt and buy out the Higgs charity's share of ACL, in return for a long lease on the stadium and a more affordable rent. An outside operator, AEG, would come in to run the venue more efficiently.
The council and ACL both agreed in principle - but then went behind SISU's back. In January 2013 the council's cabinet agreed in secret to lend £14.4 million of taxpayers' money to ACL, in effect to use the public purse to shore up its own failed enterprise by more than twice what anyone believed the stadium was worth. The scheme was hatched by former council leader John Mutton, chief executive Martin Reeves and finance director Chris West. Vast sums were spent with fancy PR company Weber Shandwick to spin the line that a once proud football club was being used in an attempted asset strip by an evil, grasping, hedge fund.
Freedom of Information requests by the Eye and others to the council to disclose exactly how much taxpayers' money has been spent on PR have been rebuffed because Shandwick's client is the "private" ACL, not the council. But at the High Court earlier this month, a Higgs charity email was disclosed which said it had been "invited to join the city council and ACL in the instruction of Weber Shandwick to handle the public relations interests of all three parties at no cost to the charity." In other words, one way or another, the council would pick up the bill.
The court case was brought by Higgs in an attempt to recover legal costs from SISU because the 2012 deal had never been followed through. But the court accepted SISU's argument that Higgs, ACL and the council had never had any intention of making it work.
More embarrassing revelations are expected when SISU goes back to the High Court for a judicial review of the council's decision to loan ACL £14.4 million.
Until recently the saga was excellently covered by the Coventry Telegraph's star reporter, Les Reid, but Reid's editor Alun Thorne, has his head firmly stuck up the backside of council chief exec Reeves, who didn't like the direction Reid's inquiries were heading. Thorne bravely resolved this conflict of interest...by taking the award-winning hack off the story.
