For the sake of the public interest (if anyone is actually interested), I've just posted the following on the Gillingham Vital Football board. I've posted most of the information on here before, but it's a bit of a summary
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For the sake of further clarity Gillingham Football Club Ltd. (00039175) is the club as we know it, of which PS owns 75% of the shares through his holding company GFC Holdings Ltd (06361208).
That's the clear bit, and after that it gets more complicated. What follows is my understanding of situations and events, with timings based on accounting records, and not any more detailed and cross-checked research. Some of the events and information are referred to in other postings on this thread. Therefore I am not presenting it as definitive fact, or indeed that it is not already in the public domain (which it is), or anything new, but just a hopefully fairly comprehensive summary of my opinion of the current businesses relating to our club. Yes Mr. Scally, it is our club. You just happen to have custody of it at the moment.
GFC Holdings Ltd is PS's holding company through which he consolidates his interests in GFC (the Club, not the Limited Company). In the last published accounts (May 2015) these were Gillingham Football Club Ltd and Priestfield Developments Ltd.
Priestfield Developments Ltd. was the company that purchased the ground from the club for £10m in 2007/8. This was done through a loan / mortgage taken out on Priestfield Developments Ltd., and no doubt secured against the ground. Priestfield Developments Ltd. was 100% owned by PS.
In 2011/12 Priestfield Developments Ltd. sold the ground back to Gillingham Football Club Ltd. for £1.8m, the funding for that coming from a loan to Gillingham Football Club Ltd. from a company called Three Directors Ltd. (company number 07627655), which is owned in equal shares by Mssrs. Scally, Quarrington and Anderson, who are also the directors of Gillingham Football Club Ltd. The 2016 accounts for Three Directors Ltd. have been filed, and those show that the debt was still outstanding at 31st May 2016.
That of course left a substantial loss on the books of Priestfield Developments Ltd., in the last published accounts that loss was showing as £9.05m. Nevertheless in October 2016 an application was made to strike off Priestfield Developments Ltd., in other words to close down the company, and the company was duly dissolved in January 2017. I am not an accountant or a solicitor, but I would have thought that company law would prevent a company closing down voluntarily if it were insolvent or in debt. If that is the case them someone somewhere has written off the debt of £9.05m, unless it has been transferred to another company.
So, where are we? I'm pretty sure that the first notice for compulsory strike off against Gillingham Football Club Ltd. and Priestfield Developments Ltd. has been made because the accounts for the year to 31st May 2016 have not been submitted to Companies House. We'll know more when the notice document is published which looks like it will be early next week.
That leaves us with the question as to WHY the accounts have not been filed. With accounting software being used for day to day bookkeeping these days there's no real reason why audited accounts can't be prepared by few months after year end. I think that larger companies only get 6 months to submit accounts, smaller get 9, and GFC have already taken 11 not to submit them. It's nearly the end of the next financial year. Even an organisation as large as Lloyds TSB has today published its results for the first quarter of 2017 - possibly unaudited, but they are unlikely to publish anything that won't satisfy detailed scrutiny.
Yes, PS has been ill, but that hasn't prevented him sorting out Priestfield Developments Ltd. I don't subscribe to the view that it's anything to do with declaration of his consultancy fees, I think he's too thick skinned to let that worry him, and in any case these are the accounts for the year that ended on 31st May 2016. What has happened since, including the dissolving of Priestfield Developments Ltd., will only be reflected in the current year's accounts, whenever they're published.
As with many matters surrounding PS's running of the club there are mysteries, to which of many we may never know the answers, but my gut feeling is that something is going on (or has gone on, given the historic nature of accounting filing), and there is ongoing discussion as to how it can be legally reported, as would be required, whist disclosing as little information as possible.
Ah well, it's a distraction from Sunday anyway.
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