Well... according to companies house we aren't in Admin yet !

I would think that any investor looking at the way this Club operates with the present shareholding would insist on all those shareholders giving up their shares for a nominal amount or wait until administration becomes a reality then pick up the pieces. Persuading said shareholders to sell their shares would help in resolving the present contentuous way the Club is being run and would solve a lot more immediate issues which administration would only exacerbate!
Can't see it happening but it would be a better way forward all round!

Administration is a response to insolvency. As an alternative to liquidation (receivership having been largely killed off by the 2002 Enterprise Act. It was never intended to be a means of contriving an insolvency so that an ownership impasse can be resolved. If the club is indeed insolvent, and there is realistic chance of saving the business in some form, then administration is the clear way to go. Sorting out the shareholder bollox once and for all to help stop the same mess happening all over again would be a huge bonus, and I suspect could influence the High Court's decision if the situation was at all marginal. What I am less clear on is whether a minority of shareholders could challenge the granting of an Administration Order, in the same way as the majority made clear they would in the leaked letter (your thoughts?).

If there was a prepack in place, it would all be over before the creditors had a chnace to consider anything - that is the big argument against prepacks.

If - and its a big if - the review concludes that administration is the only realistic option to preserve the business in the longer term (I feel sure that they could mog on through this season with some player sales) and IF there is a prepack and IF the terms of that prepack are that Newco will satisfy ALL the recorded non-shareholder creditors and IF the RFL thereby agrees to waive any points deduction because the only loss has been to shareholders (and tough, that's life) and do not otherwise impose penalty because Newco has treated the players and other staff fairly - IF all of the above, then I'm for it. Have said so from the start. But if all those terms are not met, I become increasingly worried for each term that is not.

Forget that. Takes several days for new notices to appear, once they are filed - and there are usually time allowances for that. need to keep an eye on the London Gazette.

I think you will find that the pledge money will have paid any debts that were covered by directors personal guarantees, I think most people would and do make the same decisions when as company directors they are looking at possible administration.

And that is an important point.

SHOULD the company enter formal insolvency, the insolvency practitioner appointed is required to enquire of creditors and other parties regarding the conduct of the directors in the period leading up to the insolvency. Can you see the potential significance of the leaked letter now? A question that the administrator would surely need to consider is whether the directors paid off certain creditors (i.e the bank) in preference to other creditors, for reasons other than necessary business ones. If they DID, that could well be judged to be a "fraudulent preference" and liable to be set aside. In which case, the former guaranteeing directors could find themselves being pursued by the bank for a liability they thought had been settled.

If the directors called in the pledges without having reasonable grounds to believe that insolvency would thereby be avoided, this is in my opinion a very real threat to the former directors. One assumes they - and of course lawyer Caisley - were well aware of it - and I specifically mentioned the risk of fraudulent preference to them and they seemed to be - which was perhaps the biggest reason why I felt able to trust that they did indeed have a realistic plan in place.

As always, time will tell!

10am friday deadline past, no announcement. the Bulls have updated the website this morning with a new story about the academy, and the T&a have run a usual piece. Can we assume this first deadline is wrong then?

Given the degree of lock down at the club regarding whats going on, and where the review is happening (ie not Odsal) I struggle to belive this rumour from the op tbh. It might be that admin happens, it might not, but I don't think it will be leaked in this manner either way. The first we'll know about it will come from a press release from the BODs.

Cheers to the mods for the thread title change and well done to the op for getting so many arguments going.

The reality is that the bank and other creditors with pgs covering their loans / debts will not cause a fuss because thet have been paid, the reamaining creditors will be made up of small companies and maybe larger companies who are owed ` small ` ammounts. Added together I would guess at say 1 million pounds in total for a business the size of the Bulls. If administration is entered then as is 99.9% always the case these small creditors lick their wounds and move on because if they want to call a creditors meeting and pursue the directors then guess what the costs of doing this are down to them. Whilst on the subject can you see a new investor coming in and picking up the liability for the debts, they would surely want a clean slate.

Noticed the OP was lurking on the forum just after 10 to see how much trouble he'd managed to stir up

I was just able to log on during my break, that's all.

Don't you mean morning tea?

Sale of lease was a stroke of genius. Taking an asset not represented on the balance sheet into cash; good piece of strategic thinking. Not forgetting that the deal was struck with RFL with a guarantee to retain £350,000 of a long term loan, which was reneged on at point of signing. Also at same time bank reneged on a written deal to reduce overdraft facility at 10% a month. That equated to a loss of £635,000 in cash more or less overnight. Tell me any club without a sugar daddy that could stand that loss of cash? The pledge monies plus other options on the table (and not just Mr Fraudster) had the potential to help the club's mid term future IMO

That would mean Sod Hall have found the Bulls to be an embarrasment for whatever reasons and then engineered a scenario that would force the Bulls into administration hmmm

Just so it's clear, what do you mean by the RFL reneging on the deal at the point of signing?

I ask because I'm not sure how you renege on a deal prior to signing the contract which affirms the agreement.

Do you mean the RFL and the Bulls struck a verbal deal and when the contract arrived it didn't contain what the Bulls understood it was going to? If so, why did they sign it?

Isn't it also the case that the club now has to pay rent when it didn't before?

Have we gone it to administration yet?

I think the ground deal is starting to look at lot like a "commercial" pay day loan, a bit of short term cash a lot of long term pain?

Maybe it (the signing) all came down to timing. Maybe we needed the cash by a certain date and the RFL left us in a position where we had to sign, get the cash, (that may have been promised elsewhere, such as HMRC) meaning that they pretty much could renegotiate the terms to suit them as ee were over a barrell with our pants down.

This sort of ties into things that have come to light, eg, the RFL calling in its loan unexpectedly.....

As I posted many weeks ago, the ground deal with rhe RFL had to happen because Bulls had not made a single repayment on the £ 700,000 loan from the RFL. Rfl loaned Bulls £ 700,000 in Jan / Feb 2011, repayment schedule was agreed and Bulls did not meet a single repayment. The ground sale was a good way for RFL to get the £ 700,000 back and put the balance into the Bulls. RFL were very very understanding to Bulls and were more than helpfull.

That's interesting. Do you mind me asking how you know this?

I appreciate all the previous posts are hearsay based upon some form of inside knowledge. However added together they show what an absolute farce that our club has become. The financial mismanagment makes Enron look good!!!

10am on a Friday before an extended bank holiday with a home game in the middle never struck me as being a sensible time to go into administration

To be honest for a couple of years the wizards in Houston were considered the Dogs Bollocks of the corperate world, and don't think the reputation of the Bulls management has regularly managed to get above total - and before you all start I know I am being very generous today!

You learn something every day - how very gentile the language is on this forum I could have sw****n I typed something else?

HMRC. And, just possibly, the Council.

The rest of the creditors...I tend to agree.

HMRC would likely be owed enough to very much NOT take it lying down. And their current policy is to be far more active and challenging than in the past, since Crown Preference was abolished and the taxpayer has been taken for a ride too many times by failing businesses, especially in the leisure industry.

I suspect any challenge would only come from HMRC, and would very much depend on how much of the total creditors they represented, how much they were owed and whether any of the monies were overdue. I suspect the latter will approximate to nil.

There are precedents for new investors picking up the debts - certainly other than any debt to HMRC - voluntarily. Usually where they perceive the need to retain the goodwill of and services of suppliers outweighs the financial benefit. Brintons Carpets was a good example of this, last year. My guess is that such debts in total are quite modest, since who in their right mind would advance significant credit to the Bulls right now? The costs of settling these trade creditors, especially local ones, could easily be less than the consequential effects on PR and goodwill if they were not settled, IMO.

And the new owners could (and surely would) agree to honour existing season tickets and prepaid sponsorships, which otherwise would of course represent significant creditors.

And would the incoming owner/s leave players and other employees unpaid? They would be creditors too in the event of insolvency.

In any case, any employees kept on would presumably be TUPEd across anyway, so that is automatic assumption of (actual and contingent) liabilities.

So yes, I certainly COULD see an incoming investor, at least one who wanted to maintain the goodwill of the fans, sponsors, players, staff, local suppliers and the wider community, deciding it was in his/her/its interest to settle various existing debts voluntarily. That is what the vehicle formed to buy the Brintons business did. Whether one WOULD is something I hope we never have to find out.

The bigger issue could be with all the other contingent creditors - such as the council under the Odsal settlement. Liabilities that would crystalise only on insolvency (same as the employee claims) Any settlement with these would I suspect consist of assuming the contract and therefore the contingent liability if the other party demanded it.

That said, the council took out a charge on the club's assets concurrent with the lease sale, so they would get first dibs after the prefs anyway.

And of course there is the matter of what the RFL would insist upon, both on its own account as a probable creditor and to protect the interest of the players and the wider game. Although the precedents there seem far less clear-cut!

This entire thread is an irrelevance we are not going into administration.

Watch this space and the programme notes on Monday make interesting reading