PJ given full backing despite nigh on walking out the door after the Hull game? I hope I am wrong, but I just get a horrible feeling that our beloved club is being used as a pawn of some sorts for business purposes other than that of football. Has Evans got plans for ITFC that involve deliberate loss making for tax reasons or whatever? I'm no accountant but this all seems a little too surreal. I'm sure any other business that was on the rocks would be looking to replace management and install some stability at the earliest possible opportunity . Maybe I'm just to cynical.....Maybe I'm just scared.......
I would say all is not as it seems, It certainly doesn't seem a priority to build a team for the future. Maybe Evans hasn't actually got a pot to piss in.
£3m a year in interest payments and us owing him upwards of £50m is probably where his interest lies!
He is getting something like 5% interest and is only getting it when we are in the premiership which seems fair to me.
you do realise the interest rate evans is charging has never been confirmed? you also now owe him £73m. not bad for a purchase of £6m...
This is quite a worrying state of affairs and it seems that his good intentions/ambitions that he had when he started with ITFC are diminishing... and who can blame him. He clearly overfunded an under skilled manager and feels like a prat for not making this a successful business venture, hence why we are scaling back. I would say however that he has to sell us to be able to get anywhere near that money owed to him in his lifetime and quite honestly no one would be willing to take a punt on us and our £73m debt to our main investor (I can't imagine him accepting much less) so we will be stuck with him for better or for worse for the foreseeable future and hopefully he can see that to make us (himself) profitable he needs to stabilise and improve the club
http://www.financialfairplay.co.uk/resources/Ipswich Town FC 30 June 2011.pdf if you want the full picture you can see how much ME is making out of his litle venture in black and white. Page 21 especially makes interesting reading on his part in this. The debt owed to the ME empire is rising at something like £9m a year.
his intentions may very well be good, i can't possibly know for sure one way or the other, but i've read quite a bit about his businesses and to say he's 'shady' would be an understatement... and as you can see by simply reading your own club accounts, he's not running your club in an appropriate manner.
My question (if anyone is able to answer it) is with the £9m a year extra we owe Marcus Evans, how and when are we likely to pay that back? We are not making anywhere near enough in turnover each year (not even enough to cover the interest) so in essence he is racking up a tab that we won't be able to pay off unless he sells us, in which case I'm sure he's savvy enough to know he will have to do a deal similar to that in which he bought us by writing off some of that debt. 1. In which case is he getting it so high because he knows he will have to accept a discount on his debts... for example 50% of £90m is higher than 50% of £50 and therefore trying to gain a larger profit margin when he eventually sells us? 2. Or is he going to one day demand his money back and therefore we go bust or sell every asset we have (Nowhere near enough value to cover that cost) and so probably reverting to the first option. This has striking similarity to student loans, I currently have a £20k+ debt that I am not even paying off the monthly interest that is being added and not looking like making any serious dents into it until it is eventually written off by the government in so many years time. I could go in to further resemblances but I digress, the point being he is going to one day sell us and the question is how will that leave us? and what is Marcus Evans' legacy on ITFC which only time will tell
If we owe the ME Group x million extra that’s because the ME Group is bailing us out to the tune of x million extra. Would you prefer they didn’t? Given the wages alone are over turnover (and will be again this year – despite the trimming of the monthly wages the multitudinous contract pay-offs will have to appear somewhere) either other costs are slashed or the bills (not least for the academy) have to be picked up. If it isn’t loans from MEG funding this excess then we could run to the banks for it, and they really would be likely to close us down. Realistically, what has ME to gain for deliberately (Bond villain style) chucking money at us only to use it as an excuse to bin the going concern and sell off the real estate? Would that net him the 50+ million needed to turn a profit on the venture (add back possible tax benefits to the group as a whole from our losses)? More realistically, he got himself into this not realising his cretinous managerial appointments would take us to the brink of League One after five years. I’m sure he was confident we’d go forward, not backwards. His options are: 1. Get us to the Premier League for sufficient seasons to repay the debt and start turning a profit – this probably means even with Superman (the DC hero, not pyjamas) in charge we’d probably yoyo a fair bit until we’d had sufficient Prem’ income for this. 2. Get us to the Premier League, somehow consolidate and THEN sell us, because as a viable Premier League club we would sell for sufficient millions. Either way, his only viable options are long term, unless he can find some oil sheik with nothing better to do than chuck 70+M about when there’s clubs in a much better state than us and doubtless cheaper to buy.
