Chester

[Summerof69]

Interesting goings on at Chester, also :

CHESTER CITY - THE TAX MAN BITES BACK

From www.twohundrepercent.net

Upon first sight, it may seem surprising that a victory for the tax man should
be greeted with the faintly audible sound of cheering in the distance but such
was the mess that is Chester City Football Club that it feels increasingly as if
their demise is the only way that the game will rid itself of their owner,
Stephen Vaughan. The question of which Stephen Vaughan we are talking about is,
of course, a moot point since his son took a directorship at the club earlier
this year in place of his father. What has become increasingly apparent over the
last few weeks is that the authorities have become increasingly impatient with
the goings-on at The Deva Stadium, and the situation took a turn for the worse
for the club's supporters earlier this week.

Since the club put itself into administration earlier this summer, there had
been a hint that all was not what it might be at Chester City Football Club.
This was most starkly exposed by the Football Association's refusal to grant the
club a licence to play, even in pre-season friendlies. The club thought that it
had agreed an escape route to its insolvency with a CVA, but this was challenged
by Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs at court this week and, in a move that
seems to demonstrates just how far down the line Chester are at the moment, HMRC
won their case with an objection against the CVA at court on Wednesday. The club
is now back in administration, without a licence to play from the Football
Association and with just weeks to go before the start of the new season.

What, then, were HMRC objecting to? Insolvency laws relating to Company
Voluntary Arrangements are pretty specific, and HMRC lost their legal status as
a preferred creditor several years ago. The amount believed to be owed by
Chester City to HMRC was in the region of GBP1m. It's a sizeable amount of
money, and under normal circumstances it might have given HMRC a blocking vote
against any proposed CVA (any creditor owed more than 25% of the total amount of
money to be included in the CVA can block the approval of the arrangement). In
the case of Chester City, however, there were GBP4m of other debts to be taken
into account. The HMRC could vote, but they didn't have a blocking vote in the
case of the Chester City CVA. The arrangement was agreed at a creditors' meeting
on June 11th.

So far, so good, then. Nothing illegal going on - a little side-stepping to get
around the rules on insolvency and the ownership of football clubs, perhaps, but
nothing we haven't seen before. What was extraordinary, however, was this post
on the Conference Forum yesterday morning. Could it be true that Chester City
Football Club spent GBP143, 750 on services to a company called Hannah
Industrial Services that was only formed in February 2009? A cleaning bill of
over GBP11,000 per week? The cold feet of the Football Association and the
blocking tactics of HMRC suddenly start to make a good deal more sense, as does
Judge Pelling QC's decision to revoke the arrangement. The 1986 Insolvency Act
only allows two specific grounds for the revoking of a CVA - either the CVA
unfairly prejudices the interests of a creditor or shareholder, or there has
been some material irregularity at the shareholders' or creditors' meeting. The
judge's verdict, therefore, was a damning indictment of whatever has been going
on at Chester over the last few months or so.

Now is surely the time for Chester City supporters to admit that this club and
this regime is nothing that they can conscionably be involved with. Their club
may yet stagger and lurch into the new season, bloodied, bruised and carrying a
hopelessly punitive points deduction. They may not, though, and it's difficult
to see where their salvation will come from at this point. The timing couldn't
come at a much worse time, of course. Any new club in Chester would almost
certainly have no League to play in for a year. As things stand, however, the
existing Chester City club seem unlikely to be starting next season either. The
time might be right for the club's supporters to step back from their
predicament and take control of their own destinies.

[STFC_Gazza]

Chester will be kicked out of the Conference on Monday at 5:30 if they do not pay Wrexham for their portion of gate receipts or pay for the loan of a player from Vauxhall motors.

[Summerof69]

As Gazza as bought back the story :

CHESTER CITY FOOTBALL CLUB – THE DEATH RATTLE (PART ONE) From www.twohundredpercent.net

Chester Fans United, a coming together of the different fans’ groups at the stricken Blue Square Premier club, meet tomorrow night to formally agree their formation. They have a few thousand pounds in the bank, which is enough to get them up and running, but it certainly isn’t enough to save their club and the general consensus now is that they already know it. A new deadline has been set. By 5.30 on Monday evening, Chester City may well have ceased to exist. At this point, CFU’s raison d’etre will become to form a new club, freed from the shackles of the wretched ownership that they have suffered under for the last few seasons or so.

The latest threat to their existence comes from the Football Conference, who have issued a complete player embargo upon the club and the deadline to pay up over unpaid bills to other clubs – a split of gate receipts that was due to be paid to their local rivals Wrexham, and has also failed to make any payment to another club, Vauxhall Motors, for a player that they took on loan. The amount of money owed to the two clubs is believed to be in the region of GBP30,000-GBP40,000. They also make reference to, more generally, Chester City’s non-compliance “with the terms of the compromise agreement set by the Football Conference to allow the club to participate in the competition at the commencement of the current season”.

One might wonder what the mish-mash of authorities that actually allowed the club to start the season were actually thinking of when they arrived at the decision. The financial situation at The Deva Stadium was clear for anyone to see at this point. What Stephen Vaughan said to them in the course of the meeting that ended up with the club being allowed to play has never been made public. It has even been suggested that the Football League leant on the Football Conference because they didn’t want to see a club dropping straight out and going bust.

When previous manager Mick Wadsworth left the club last month, he commented that, “This place is full of negativity and it’s really difficult. I’ve never known an environment like it”. This was coming from a man that had managed at Scarborough, Gretna and at Carlisle United under Michael Knighton during the 1990s. This sort of a statement, coming from a man that had left his previous managerial position after becoming one of forty people to be laid off because they couldn’t afford to pay him any more, spoke volumes for the depth of the difficulties at the club. Crowds have plummeted again and, even if they were to survive this particular crisis and the other crises that would inevitably follow it over the course of the remainder of the season, relegation to the Blue Square North is surely something approaching inevitable.

It’s possible to argue that Chester supporters should have acted earlier, but the clubs owner’s actions over the last few weeks would seem to indicate that they could have protested all they wanted and for as long as possibly could have and he still wouldn’t have left the club. The rumours continue to circle that John Batchelor, who almost drove York City to the wall several years ago, is circling with a desire to rip up the history of the club and “re-brand” it as Harchester United or Red Bull Chester City.
Any Chester supporters hoping that Batchelor might be a knight in shining armour should take a moment to read this, from The Guardian last year: “Of
24 companies of which he has been a director, 14 have been or are about to be struck off the companies register, six have been insolvent, three are still going but he is no longer involved – he says he sold them on successfully – and only one small company in which he is a director is active. One company Batchelor took over – although he did not become a director; his partner, Cheryl Hopkins, did – was Moornate Chemists in Nelson, near Burnley, a steady, solvent, family business selling cleaning products. Within three months, last July, Moornate was insolvent and in administration, after effectively being merged with another company he took over, Besglos, which was also in administration the following month.”

David Brown, Moornate’s former owner, says Batchelor promised to pay him GBP485,000 for the business, in instalments, and did pay him GBP70,000 up front. However, he has been left devastated, without the business he built up over 30 years, and still owed GBP415,000 of the price agreed.
Batchelor, however, has said he bought and sold Moornate’s factory, making GBP75,000 for himself.

“He ruins people’s lives and walks away with money,” Brown says. Several former staff of Besglos, and their families, are still struggling to recover, having moved to work for Batchelor on the promise of handsome salaries, then been left unpaid and lost their jobs. Brown recalls that in one meeting Batchelor told him: “This is what I do for a living: I f#@k companies.”

Of course, any talk of Batchelor getting involved is likely to be irrelevant, since Vaughan has shown no intention whatsoever of giving up control of the club and, in any case, there is entirely possible that there will not even be a Chester City Football Club by the middle of next week. Ironically, Chester’s next (and possibly last) match will be an FA Cup match at Barrow on Saturday. Barrow, of course, are the club that Vaughan almost sent to the wall in his previous attempt at running a club, during the late 1990s. It will be interesting to see how quickly they give them their split of the gate receipts for the match. One would imagine that Vaughan will be knocking on the office doors at Holker Street at about ten to five on Saturday afternoon. Even if he gets the money in used fivers, however, it is unlikely to be enough in itself to keep them afloat.

Miracles do happen and they happen more regularly in football, it often seems, than anywhere else. This time, however, Stephen Vaughan has annoyed the Football Conference off (that much is evident from the terseness of their official message on the subject) and in the modern game it seems that you can bend the insolvency laws as much as you like, keep your ownership structure buried under impenetrable layers of holding companies, mess the tax man (and, by extension, the taxpayer) around and treat your supporters with little more than contempt, but if you get on the wrong side of the people that run the game, then you’ve done something very wrong indeed and you are likely to pay for it. Chester Fans United deserve our support for getting their act together and one would hope that they would decide not to throw money onto the bonfire that is Chester City Football Club. It is surely clear that a new club is the only way forward for the supporters of Chester City.

[Summerof69]

Now been served a WUP by HMRC :

http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/59306/notices/1017019

[STFC_Gazza]

They may as well fold. As harsh as it is, They will be in the Conference North next season, crowds well below 2,000 now, likely to be kicked out of the conference the way of Boston United into the Unibond Northern Premier League due to their debts and not paying players. That said I beleive new owners are looking to take charge.

[Summerof69]

Reading this article makes what's going on at Pompey look sane :

From www.twohundredpercent.net

Since we last reported from Chester City, much has happened and nothing has
changed. At the same time, owner Stephen Vaughan was due to have ceded all
control in the club by the middle of December having been disqualified as a
company director after an investigation by the Insolvency Service's
Disqualification Investigation Team over alleged carousel fraud. Casual
observers may have been forgiven, however, for continuing to hold the impression
that not a great deal has changed at The Deva Stadium over the last month or so.
Over the last couple of weeks, however, things have started to become farcical
there.

First of all came the arrival of Morell Maison, fresh from his disastrous spell
at Halesowen Town, which left the Southern League club teetering on the brink of
closure, banned from FA competitions this year after they failed to pay
Maisdtone United and Durham City gate receipts from matches against them last
year in the FA Cup and the FA Trophy (which left a particularly bitter taste in
the case of Durham, who had to release all of their players during the summer
after the withdrawal of a sponsor, leaving them gamely but distastrously
battling away at the bottom of the UniBond League Premier Division with a youth
team) and boycotted by their own supporters.

Maison didn't seem particularly clear on what his role at the club actually was.
His official title seems to be "Director Of Football", but according to
subsequent press interviews he still hasn't met the players yet. The question of
why a club would be taking on a Director of Football when the players hadn't
been paid for two months wasn't, unsurprisingly, answered by the club itself.
Maison started his time at the club with an interview on BBC London's Non-League
Show on the 4th of January. He stated - at first - that the club was still under
the ownership of both Stephen Vaughan Junior and Senior (news that may have been
of interest to the FA as well as the Insolvency Service) before amending this
statement to say that Vaughan Senior hadn't been involved in his appointment. He
then went on to state that he wasn't being paid for his position and that he
wouldn't be getting involved in issues on the playing side of the football club.
He contradicted himself on one of these statements within the body of the
interview (claiming to have signed two players on loan from Mansfield Town), and
the truth behind the other started to come out in the next few days.

By the end of the week, the truth was starting to emerge, as rumours began to
circulate that Maison had paid GBP75,000 for a share in the club, though details
remain sketchy over whether this has actually taken place or what he may have
paid for. It would have been interesting to hear his interview at the bank for
that particular loan. At the same time, manager Jim Harvey gave up the ghost and
left the club. Reports on BBC Radio Merseyside again linked Vaughan Senior with
the running of the club, stating that it was he that had told Harvey that he had
no future at the club. At the same time, Cambridge United were have reported to
have reported the club over non-payment for loan players that the Chester took
from them during the first half of this season.

It seems that these are the straws that are finally breaking the camel's back.
There is now open talk on the club's forum, Devachat, of a breakaway club with
the major sticking point between supporters now being whether they should go now
in order to be prepared for the start of next season or wait to see if or when
the club goes bust in order to secure a lease on The Deva Stadium. It seems
unlikely that they will get a lease on what they would regard as their home
until the old club has finally vacated it, unless the local council step in and
evict Chester City. Whether they would be able to do this legally would depend
on the terms of the lease. Meanwhile, it now seems likely that everything will
be done in order for Chester to complete their fixtures this season. It has been
mentioned that the survival of the club for this season is likely to be ensured,
but where they go at the end of the season is very much open to question. The
Football Conference has a deal that it brokered with the Football League for two
promotion and relegation places, and it doesn't wish to jeopardise them. At the
end of the season, though, with relegation seeming a near certainty, what
exactly will happen?

Even allowing for the absurd and flagrant abuses of the rules that they have
already piled up this season and the extent to which they have got away with it,
it seems scarcely credible that the club will not have the book thrown at it
once 2009/10 is out of the way. The issues of ownership, non-payment of football
debts and the manner in which it started the season would seem to indicate that
expulsion from the Conference is likely and that the club would have to start
next season in the UniBond League Premier Division at best. There is precedent
for this, in the case of Boston United a couple of years ago. Boston, a club of
a similar size to Chester, remain in the middle of the UniBond League - proof,
as if it were needed, that the long-haul back to the Football League is
something that has to be worked for rather than a series of rights of accession.

Even if it didn't, relegation from the Blue Square Premier at the end of this
season is already almost inevitable - the club would need around forty-five to
fifty points from their remaining matches to have anything like a realistic
chance of avoiding relegation. Players seem to be leaving on an almost daily
basis, and the club will be unlikely to make much revenue from match days if a
full boycott. Ultimately, however, the charade of anybody at the club actually
giving a damn about the supporters of the club vanished a long time ago. It is
now the football authorities that the club's owners have to persuade. They have
played them off for mugs several times before - will they be able to get away
with it yet again?

And in the comments section of the blog, was this gem: Facebook can be a useful
site to keep in touch with friends etc, but also a wonderful repository of
gubbins. Ladies & gents, I give you the Morell Maison fan page:
www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=3789940128

As a Cambridge United fan, I'm still amazed we let Mark Beasley go on loan to
Chester, as anyone with half a brain can work out that the club have no money.
At our fans forum, any worries about the loan were brushed off with a "we are
football creditor, don't worry" response. I wish no ill to the fans of Chester,
but if this is another nail in the coffin of Stephen Vaughn FC, then so be it.
AFC Chester is only option.

[Summerof69]

Chester's game tonight at Forest Green postponed, due to the players refusing to get on the team bus !!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_conf/8493550.stm

[Rich Pullen]

... that'll be that then for Chester City.

[Peter Venkman]

That will be a 3 point penalty/forfeit then by the look of it then to add to the woes.

[ronnie21]

Can Forest Green sue them for the cost of the pies going to waste?

[reeves4england]

That will be a 3 point penalty/forfeit then by the look of it then to add to the woes.

I may be wrong, but I think the penalties for not fulfilling a fixture are significantly greater than a 3 point penalty

[Rich Pullen]

...and Chester have already had a match abandoned this season so they are in big trouble.

[suttonred]

They'll get thrown out this time. I work with a Chester fan, he's prepared for it, just wants rid of the idiots running the club.

[STFC_Gazza]

Chester are likely to be kicked out of the Conferece now surely. Even the Chester fans are saying they should be kicked out as its not fair for the integrity of the game. THe players have not been paid for 3 months, they have a Sunday league manager as boss, no chance of staying up. Fans have boycotted games and seen attendances aroudn 500. Chester fans want CCFC to be wound up so they can start their own team for the 2010/11 season. In theory if they get a team together now they could join 1 stage below the conference north (as you have to start atleast 2 divisions below where you are in the football pyramid) and be on a sound financial footing.

http://www.devachat.com/

[pauld]

They'll get thrown out this time. I work with a Chester fan, he's prepared for it, just wants rid of the idiots running the club.

Seems like the FA/Conference/FL are desperate to keep Chester going at least till the end of the season, no matter how flagrant their breaches of any/all rules. It's a series of horrendous failures to enforce the regs, initially it seems because the FL/FA didn't want to have a League club fall out of the League and go pop immediately. So on the one hand they withheld the League parachute payment because of outstanding questions around the ownership of Chester (basically whether the money would just get ripped off), but on the other leant on the Conference not to push them too hard in case they went bust half way through and could then point the finger at the League. And while the authorities have dithered and vascillated in the hope that Chester would quietly die in the close season (and so leave them with "clean hands"), they've left some of the worst owners in the League/non-League structure to rape the club. Absolute fucking disgrace. The whole episode typifies at the bottom of the scale, as Portsmouth does at the top, why the last people fans can look to for help when their club is being torn apart are the very authorities charged with preserving the "integrity of the game". They should all hang their heads in shame.

Football is in for a very rough period - you can only hope that most clubs survive and most of the administrators/regulators, who have so woefully failed the game, the clubs and the fans, don't