Thanks for the info as always mate. You reckon there is any chance SD and Sartori would/could pay back the loan to the Yanks This would allow him to sell to the highest bidder.
I have no info on that mate. However, the only way Donald can pay back FPP is with his own money. He can't take out a secured loan as FPP wouldn't permit it. He can't sell, with the FPP money outstanding, as they wouldn't permit it. If Donald pays FPP he'll have to risk losing more money. Buyers will know that and can hang him out to dry. Hopefully FPP will do what they came in to do all those months ago.
I think this pretty much sums it up. It's been mentioned before that SD wanted to retain a % of shares if FPP bought the club. This alone may have been a deal breaker as far as the Yanks were concerned at the time hence the loan rather than a purchase. Now that SD has said he will sell up then if FPP still want us then all that is really needed is a price to be negotiated and agreed upon. A simple solution may be that they say "don't worry about paying back the parachute payments you borrowed from the club and just hand us over the keys."
Personally think a lot of the £10m has already been sucked up into the running of the club. I think if he wants to pay it back he will have to get Sartori to bail him out or take a personal hit and don't think he will do that. He could of course as you say add it to the selling price but will FFP allow him to Think we'll find out pretty soon if the Americans seriously want to run the club or not
I think you're basing this on one assumption that I don't believe right now, and that is that FPP believe we're a good investment. I don't think we can rule out the possibility that SD asked for this money as a loan, with a 'can't lose' condition that if he didn't repay it in 18 months, they'd get the club which - if they didn't want it - could be sold without hassle. If he did well, they may reconsider their original stance. The cost of spending money on due diligence for a PE firm is way overstated here. Their bill will inevitably be high by our standards, but believe me when I say that I see these deals get done via my partner who deals with far bigger acquisitions than football clubs, and the cost of due diligence etc will have been peanuts to people who are serious investors. As for setting up a company, I mean do it yourself if you like. Takes 5 minutes on Companies House. I doubt they were particularly active in either beyond the high level discussions. I think they were interested in the idea, but it's like buying a vintage sports car and realising that it's in no fit state to race. Under the bonnet is a mess and that may very well not be what they expected when they looked from the outside. Once they looked at our liabilities and potential revenue, they'll have costed out 5 years and worked out where we could be, where we are likely to be, and where our worst case scenario was. They obviously didn't like what they saw on that front. Ultimately it may even have been the time element of it, ie: the hands on nature of running a club at this level vs running a PL or Championship club. Even appointing the person to do that is stressful and invites scrutiny and public profile that they don't seem particularly comfortable with. There are a lot of suppositions made by people (some of mine are here), but due diligence is there to stop people making investment mistakes. The fact that this was their ultimate decision has for me always been the decisive fact in all of this. If they wanted the club, they'd have it today.
I don't think he's spent £10m on the day to day running of the club yet mate. It's almost impossible unless he's absolutely ****ed up his figures, and by some considerable margin. Whether it was earmarked for later in the year is another matter. He was going to be gauged on whether he used that money wisely, and if it was going into money pits rather than on important factors in our promotion, he'd be effectively writing off his chances of FPP taking us on, in which case... why bother? He's more likely to find a buyer without FPP there, which I think will be the ultimate outcome of this.
He certainly hasn't spent £10m but I think he totally underestimated how **** a state we were/are in and how much it takes to run a club our size. Without that loan he is hemorrhaging his own money and from everything I've seen about his "takeover" of the club he won't do that. However all speculation . Time will tell
I dream of red bull taking over like they have in Salzburg and Leipzig would not mind a bit red bull Sunderland in the future.
This is Sunderland Carty, Knowing our luck we'd get Blue Cow https://www.amazon.com/blue-cow-original-relaxation-10-ounce/dp/b000xk6nty
We all will, and can speculate 'til the cows come home. None of us are privy to the amount Donald wants for the club, and how much, if anything, FPP or anyone else is willing to pay for the club.Nor do we know the ins and outs of the loan agreement.So at this stage mate, we are all guessing. I've registered businesses at Companies House, and you are right, it's easy to do. However, why would they take the time to ask permission to use the club address, if they didn't have a firm interest? If, as you say, that interest subsided because of what was 'under the bonnet', I doubt that they would loan the club £10M 'as a nice gesture'. If they didn't like what they saw, they would just move on. In my opinion, the terms of the loan must have been loaded in their favour, and include provisions which would ultimately lead to their acquisition of the club. Personally, (and I'm speculating again), I think FPP have played a blinder here. Time will tell.
I'd have thought that being able to acquire a club of Sunderland's potential with the assets it has for very little would be a good investment. The reason they opted not to dive in earlier might well have had more to do with Donald's insistence on staying on as majority shareholder than anything about the finances putting them off. That's why they tied his hands with the terms of the loan because they wanted him gone and knew he was struggling.
I've always believed that the £10m was a face saving loan to SD. After all, £10m is loose change to FPP. It would not have looked good for a second potential purchaser to walk away after receiving the due diligence report. SD and CM must have pleaded with FPP to invest something in the club, to give the impression to any future buyer that the club is an attractive proposition. Just my opinion as an outsider looking in...
on Companies House, l'll be honest, the main reasons investors tend to use the addresses of their companies is to save having their own public address in there, or because it saves them dealing with the admin I get letters and junk mail galore just because one of my investors asked us to register our office address as theirs for exactly that reason. I don't think it was a nice gesture, no, I agree it was loaded in their favour, having seen the charge sheet. I said at the time that there would be no way Donald - with the debt he owes the club already - would enter into those terms unless he was comfortable he could pay it back. They were that bad. What does that suggest to you? I would say it looks like he went pretty much on hands and knees to keep them connected with the club, which is pretty much what he admitted in the few days afterward. He knew that if they walked away, the chances of them coming back were zero. By asking them for this 'prove it and you can't lose even if you don't want us' deal, he was effectively saying that he would use that £10m to take care of one of the variables that may have concerned them enough to not get involved. I just don't think FPP want us the way we want them to want us, basically. Their influence would have been positive for us, but it all feels a bit 'Michael Owen hostage video' for my liking.
But if that's the case, why do this publicly? That's what concerns me, that he's not been able to go to them and say that he's leaving, which would pave the way for them to come on board. His first call when he decided this should have been FPP. Simple really. If it wasn't, or that call didn't go well, we know where we stand.
Yep. I think (speculation) Donald wanted to retain some shares (with the hope of selling them for a massive profit if we get back to the PL). FPP would rather own the whole thing but they can't run a club so would need to appoint someone to do it, which would be a risk on the football side since they have very little knowledge of it. So maybe it was "here's a loan, prove you can improve the club with it and we'll take over and you can be an asset by running it, meaning you're worth keeping a few shares". Now it's obvious he can't do it they might just take it for a decent price and get their own man in, maybe McClaren who has apparently been advising them and who was at the Bolton game
