No matter how this takeover goes , can " The Trust " trust Jenkin's ever again . I'm sure that many a trust member has now seen how cold a man Huw can be , some who thought they were close to him , without a clue what he's been doing for months behind most people's back . Just saying .
Given the underhanded way they've gone about this, especially keeping the Trust in the dark, Huw and the board can go **** themselves.
Valley with you for me they have sold us fans out, but I am sure time will tell. It will either be the making of us and another master stroke or he wont ever be able to set foot out I Swansea again.
I am a little bit disappointed in HJ. I like most fans i thought he was one of us, but it appears as it would be for most people, money talks and the draw of the Wonga is a bigger draw than the love of your club. Sad.
A bit harsh to blame Jinx when he has to do what he is told. Jinx is only a minor shareholder compared to some of the other Chairmen of other clubs who actually own the club.The blame has to lay with the Morgans who never had any respect at all for the trusts role in the club. What can jinx do other than go along with the Morgans and their underhanded ways.
If he wanted to lose the chairmanship of the club he could have but what would you do valley.....He had his hands well tied behind his back....
Who is " The Trust " . I'd say the trust members fall into 1 of 3 categories or all of them " Swansea till I die" r's , " Jack Army " and "Jack Bastards " . Probably nobody cares about Swansea City Football Club more than " The Trust " . People who played a big part into the nursing along the club from bleak to bliss . These are the people Morgan , Jenkin's and the rest of the selling #'s hid their negotiations from . Secret negotiations to give the Americans enough control to ultimiately render " The Trust " watered down in time . The kinda of negotiations that made the outgoing shareholders 's shares at the highest value as they sold them , while sh:ting on the very people who are the true die hard " Swansea Fans" .
The trust wouldn't have been able to change anything that has occurred these past 6 months anyway but that is no excuse just by moral standards to not have involved them from the beginning or even kept them informed.....My beef with the club is they are quite prepared to use the trust as a publicity stunt when talking about the club but when it came to the nitty gritty of the trust's involvement we are left in the dark and many of us fans and there were thousands who chipped in to purchase 21% of the club were falsely told that we could elect a leader who would be involved in every aspect of the club who would be the voice of the fans......It sounded great and the fans put thousands and thousands into the pot and bought the shares and we were very happy that this money would go into the club and the fans would never get that money back but as we thought thats OK we had a voice on the board.......It took a while but some of us began to question the role of our elected leaders job as meetings were taking place and the trust did not know about so how could he represent the fans......I left soon after very angry that the trust had been watered down that i could not see the point of it anymore and many others thought the same and like i have stated many times i refuse to give another penny to the club again for the way the club board members conned yes that's right conned the fans that they have a genuine voice on the board.... Im very pleased that the new owners like the idea of having a fans voice on the board and i will be interested to see how they operate and i hope they will value the fans input and they will not ignore the hard work we as fans did when the club was begging for funds....I hope for a new beginning because they may make loads of money and they are welcome to that but its the fans club as without us the club is nothing......We need our voice heard at boardroom level....
Maybe some shareholders who have been with us from the dark days have just had enough. It's been a long journey and I can understand why some feel they've reached the end of the road, even Huw. An opportunity has come along and we shouldn't blame them for cashing in maybe. That said, I agree that the Trust has been treated really poorly.
The clandestine nature of the take-over discussions makes it plain, to me anyway, that some shareholders have already 'left' the boardroom and are attempting to maximise personal profits without consideration to or consultation with the club. The fact these discussions were held in secret; allegedly discussions between Morgan, van Zweden (a bit of a surprise to me), Katzen and the yanks (I did some digging), tells me that there MUST be something within the whispers of the discussion that they don't want others they perceive as decentors to hear. The last time majority shareholders tried to bludgeon through the sale of ownership of the club the trust objected after they conducted their own investigation into the new, prospective owner, Moores. They and they alone, through the results of their due diligence highlighted that the sale would not benefit the club and that he was essentially a crook. This time it seems, the majority shareholders don't want any opposition or resistance to their plans to pass ownership to a third party. This tells me they don't want the sale of their shares held up by any investigation into the yanks; an investigation the trust would surely would do. This leads me to think that these yanks are in fact no better than Moore, why hide them if they were angels, and they simply want to buy us to put us their pocket. An aside: Allegedly, the only reason Dineen, the Trust and those excluded from discussion, found out about the meetings was via a leak. They were never officially told by any of the majority shareholders. Also, can we trust the yanks who are prepared to do business through backdoor negotiating, surely anyone happy to do business this way simply can't be trusted. With regard to HJ, being chairman does not mean he runs the show, far from it, a chairman simply exist to facilitate the business of the board and that said business is carried out in a legal manner, ie is 'above board'. Chairpersons must act at all times within the cradle of laws which underpin their existence and they have no legal obligation or moral rite to anything outside his/her job description. In other words, even if HJ wanted to say something, he was legally bound under company law and contract law and by his position as chairman to abide by the majority decision and so would be unable to speak even if he wanted to. I have no problem with shareholders wanting to cash in and sell their shares, I have no real issue with the Americans either as, it is not unreasonable though, for us to expect that due diligence would be done showing the transfer of ownership would be of benefit to our club. I hate all of this, IMHO, the way this affair has been conducted, the acquiescence of the majority share holders, the acceptance and willingness to enter into clandestine discussions by these yanks, the fact that not a penny of the proposed £100m will touch the club, the fact that there has been no investigation into how the yanks propose to fund the proposed share purchase, the fact that there has not been a single snippet of information on how much the yanks will actually invest INTO the club, the fact that there has been no discussion on where any further monies will come from all scream the obvious to me and the obvious is that this is a hostile takeover underpinned by the majority shareholders need and desire to sell their shares. These maneuvers are common place in international finance and are championed by American corporations who want to cash in on goldmine businesses and heavily funded industry. In our case our business is funded by obscene amounts of TV revenue, sponsorship deals and more. Purchase of a controlling stake, 75%, means all of this, all players, all assets, all incomes will belong to them and the £100,000,000 buyout is a snip when more than double that amount out, will be taken out, shipped across the pond to American corporate banks and its buy buy little Swansea. The only reason sharks bite is to eat and it never ends well for the little fish eviscerated in its teeth
The best ( the trust and its members ) the club has to offer , was dumped on in secret by the patriots of this greedy scheme .Very difficult to get past for me . My shame of Huw and some of the board has been around for a few seasons now , but this ..........what has happened to the team , that was different than most teams , and most teams respected . We will all go forward regardless , bit of a trudge for me but forward all the same .
Surely, due diligence is done by the buyers? Sellers may do some to be sure they get paid but surely no-one (certainly not the trust) has any right of veto over any transaction? Unless there is an agreement that shareholders must get permission before selling their shares, they can do what they like with their own property. There MAY be a compulsion to offer their shares to other shareholders first but that's as far as it goes in company law.
Yeah its a very complex business but the majority shareholders were wrong to not involve all shareholders. I don't have a problem about keeping things quiet until things are at an advance stage because we the fans don't really need to know at the beginning. We all knew we were up for looking for investors and we could see the lack of interest by certain board members that you could take an educated guess that some of the shareholders wanted to cash in and leave. Its all about the way they have gone behind the minor shareholders backs which i find wrong and even if they had the right to do that due to some written contract they could at the very least kept the minor shareholders up to date....
I thought due diligence should be carried out by both parties involved Frank. The Americans need to know we're a secure financial entity with no dodgy dealings so to speak, and we need to know the same of the buyers. One stumbling the buyers may encounter, and I'm just thinking out loud, is this. It could be legally proven that public money has been pseudo-invested into the club. Public money in the form of local tax breaks and incentives afforded the club by local Government as our council has always treated the Swans and the Liberty Stadium ownership as financial assets of the community. As it stands our council built the Liberty Stadium as a community asset. Along with verifiable incentives offered to the club this could mean that it could be argued that, eventhough our council doesn't physically own shares, has provided investment, in the form of public money, into the club. Part of the due diligence on our end would be to investigate that angle. If this thought experiment could be proven, and that's all it is, a thought experiment, then the sale of the club would have to go through an IPO procedure and sold in much the same way as the Post Office for example. This would mean a couple of things. Firstly the sale of shares under an IPO have to openly be offered to the general public or, a calculated portion of the shares of the club be gifted to our council as part of the deal. There's huge money in litigation and bet there's a bunch of legal hyenas looking into this as we speak.
All the seller needs tom know about the buyers is can they stump up the money. They may wish to be happy with their character but that would only be if they care into who's hands they are handing the club. It's not an IPO since the shares are being sold direct and not offered to the public. (It's not initial either!). Also, this is not going near any stock exchange. I also think the council only become involved if the club buys the asset that is the Liberty Stadium off them. Any 'contribution' they have made to the club is presumably in return for some community benefit (the mention of the word Swansea, or anywhere else, every Saturday at 5 pm has always been worth some investment by a council). Local people MAY get energised if they perceive the asset built with their money is sold off cheaply or not to their benefit, but that is another issue later, maybe.
When Swansea City Football Club was down and out , a few local investors and the people of the trust saved the club by they're actions . The few local investors are about to make a fortune at the expence of the trusts's ability to help protect the club . I think the local investors have short memories and a big money appetite.
Well it will be sink or swim after this underhanded takeover, not sure how this will go, uncertain times without doubt........
