Northampton Town FC - SaveTheCobblers

[SaveTheCobblers]

Good Evening All

Its with regret that I am posting for this reason on your fans forum.   

Northampton Town FC are at risk of going out of business in 2 weeks time. We face a winding up petition on the 16th November for an unpaid tax bill. We also find ourselves owing a massive 10Million pound loan to our local council which was taken out for stadium redevelopment, which has mysteriously gone missing in our property developing chairmans pockets David Cardoza.

I personally have followed the cobblers across land and sea of the UK, visiting the majority of the 92 football league clubs. I ask in hope that you can help us with raising awareness to our cause with help growing publicity on social media. We have a twitter pages @savethecobblers and using the hashtags #SaveTheCobblers.

Finally, I ask if you can all dig deep for as little or as much as you can. We have a fund raising page which is https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/ntfctrust , we've set a target of £100,000 to help with the tax bill and day to day running of the club but unfortunately whats needed is substantially more! We are currently just over £18,000.

Thank you for your time reading this, and we do hope to be still in existence come Christmas!!

Thanks
NTFC Supporters.

[silent majority]

As a fellow Trust we'll do our best to help.

 

[BobG]

I don't know much at all about what's happening to the Cobblers. But they had Stuart Robertson for years. Any team he played for is alright by me.

Is this yet another example of the Football League and the Football Association magnificently discharging their responsibilities?

Good luck NTFC

BobG

[Red wizard]

Feel for you and your fellow supporters. We have been there and its not good.

[Canadian Rover]

Give us Lawson D'Ath and you can have Curtis Main and a tenner!

On a serious note I think the local council and current owners at Northampton have a lot of questions to answer. Good luck with your fight.

[albie]

Looks like a proper carry on here;
​Invoices for designs of Cobblers chairman's luxury six-bed house were titled 'Northampton Town FC' | Northampton Herald & Post

Not wanting to be a pessimist but it follows this;
Northampton Town: scandal of missing millions from council’s stadium loan | Football | The Guardian

Much blubbering to come I think. Sorry for the fans.

[the vicar]

The fans are always the ones to suffer when the scroats are at work

[bobjimwilly]

Northampton Council has lodged a petition for the club to be put into admin to buy time for a rescue plan to be put together
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/34787252

[albie]

Latest instalment on this fandango;
Northampton Town: £10m loan 'misappropriated' by developers - BBC News

It's a proper corker, this show! Team going for promotion at the same time.

Probably too complicated for a film though...folk would think it too unrealistic, not true to life.

[BobG]

See the local Tory MP, ex the council, had his fingers in the pie too. Three donations, all of 5 figure amounts, to his election expenses and guess what? One of them wasn't declared to the MP's electoral register due to an "administrative oversight". If I hadn't paid my income tax last week, due to an administrative oversight, a real, proper, genuine one too, how sympathetic and understanding do you reckon the Revenue would have been?

BobG

[MachoMadness]

I'm not a financial expert by any means - which may be why I've never got any f**king money - but how does £10m simply disappear? Genuine question as I'm always baffled by how massive sums like this move around.

Used to prop up the chairman's failing businesses? Down the back of the sofa? Where's it all go?

[BobG]

In principle Macho, it's done by moving money through lots of different bank accounts, each in the name of a different company. That allows several things to happen:

1) It makes tracing the money quite diffcult. Not impossible, but a lot harder, especially if the company is a closed company that doesn't have to publish anything much in its accounts
2) Owners of each company through who's bank account the money travels are perfectly entitled to deduct 'some' (an ill defined term if ever there was one!) as a fee. The descriptions of such fees are a wonder all by themselves. But the net effect is I keep some of your money.
3) Really unscrupulous gents can spend the money in their company bank account on something entirely different to the reason the money originally arrived in the very first account. That's what's happened at Northampton: it's built the owner of several of these companies a nice new house. The argument for the defence is that the guys spending the money didn't know its original source and/or prupose. He thought he'd earned it for providing some sort of entirely mythical service for which he charged several million quid as a fee. The prosecution will argue he did know, should have known, or stole it. So then the argument comes down to who has evidence of what?

Me? I'm brill at this. I'm worth millions.

BobG

[hoolahoop]

It's sad but I can't see how they won't go to the wall. Are the council just going to right it off in these days of austerity and what hope have they in meeting everyday expenses let alone recovering any money from the scroats that have nicked it.

Time for a combined PL and FL Financial Restructuring Fund charged with not only helping out clubs in the short term but tracking down these thieving disreputable owners ?

[DonnyBazR0ver]

Arrange for an inflated "quote" for the new stand. Syphon off money for his new house. Consultancy fees paid, otherwise known as "keep your gob shut" fee. Plans for house titled "Northampton Town FC".

The clubs get's it's new stand and laddo get's new house paid for by the public purse. Until someone got careless.

Things like that could never have happened to our football club. Or could it?