Quote ="Winslade's Offload"Nathan
Looking at the annual accounts;
We spent £854k on the stadium expansion in the last financial year. If you look at the reconciliation of net cash flow to movement in net debt, you will see that our net debt only increased from 2million to 2.3million though ( we took out a new long term loan of 600k but paid back 300k of other loans). Now have a look at note 21 'capital commitments' and you will see that the remainder of the stadium costs are 540k and will fall into the next financial year.
If the profit windfall from the CC, GF and League is around 370k, we don't have to pay the one off image rights costs (268k), I would estimate that we would be clear of the stadium debts by the end of the financial year.
I am not a professional accountant though.'"
It is really hard to say without having access to the accounts but I'd note the following:
- Although bank debt has only increased £0.3m, November is a time of high cash balances typically given upfront season ticket sales and therefore additional bank debt might not be required until later in the season.
- Creditors are up £0.6m. Some of this could be associated with the stadium costs and might require additional bank debt to make good these payments in due course. This increase in creditors creates a net positive cash flow which masks a small underlying operating loss (£18k) making it unlikely that sufficient internal cash was being generated to cover the cost of the stadium without bank debt.
- The capital commitments might not represent the full outstanding cost of the building, given this was what was contracted as at November. The figures quoted for the building work in the press seem higher than the figures you have highlighted, although it's interesting to see Lance James' company seems to have done a lot of the work looking at the related party transactions in the year so this might have been at a discount.
This is all somewhat speculative however!?
