http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/sport/ ... _s_future/

Not even been seen at the Vic since the collapse of the Musgrave takeover. Staff having a fend off local businesses appearing with invoices that have been ignored for weeks and months. Basic utility bills have gone unpaid for months. We have a £48,000 tax bill due in mid February that is likely to spell the beginning of the end. It’s fairly certain that Sage have not recently stopped funding the club. This is negligence on a grand scale.

It’s the staff I feel for left to pick up the pieces whilst worrying about how they will pay the mortatge this time next month.

The contempt and anger I feel for these utter charlatans who have had there incompetent, dishonest, grubby paws all over our club for the last two and half years I can’t even put into words.

Press hype. £48K would be the tax and NI for January salaries payable by 22nd February......thats normal. How does anyone know Musgroves bid its totally off? That a part of the negotiation process.....brinkmanship.
The secret of success is keeping your head when all around you are loosing theirs.
Not impressed with this journalist......his day in the sun?

How can they claim that Backledge has been puttting £130,000 a month in??

So with season ticket money, parachute payment, gate receipts ect plus £130,000 a month we have nothing in six months!? You are talking between £1.5-2 million here, in six months. Oh and they haven’t being paying bills apart from the wages and the tax man!!!!

Does any of this add up?

Tell you what, there's going to be the biggest shitstorm when the truth gets out. SOMETHING has happened to that money..it must be in SOMEBODYS account....

With due respect are you on glue?

This situation is absolutely grave, I wish it was ‘press hype’ or ‘normal’.

Don’t forget the pots of cash that disappeared out of the club last season as well.

I forgot to even mention player sales in this which exceed half a million pounds since the end of last season. So without a doubt £2 million+ into the club should since the summer if Backledge has been putting £130,000 a month.

Evo- Stik

I think i'm starting to hate fat Pam more than Coxall, is that possible?

I don’t believe for one minute that Sage have been providing any funding other than their initial (secured) loan to Coxhall. I think the club has been funded from transfer fees, ticket sales and other income. They gambled on splashing the cash on the squad to get us pushing for promotion and maybe having a cup run to find us further and make the club more saleable. Epic fail!

This is why they wont let the trust see them, and why musgrave binned it all off the moment he had a chance to have a look.

Is today the day, the 25th Jan when all the bills have to be paid?

Yes, and they arent getting paid.

Of course it doesn't add up, yet nobody who can ask questions IS asking questions. They just print how much money this fella has apparently been spending each month, there is NEVER a mention of how much income the football club has generated over the same time period.

Somebody is telling porky pies. NONE of this adds up.

how do we know duxbury is a "chartered" accountant.....when did she qualify and which professional body is she registered with ??

I don’t really buy the theory that they ‘gambled’ on promotion either. The only players that remained from last season were the ones nobody made a bid for and we replaced them with free transfers. The playing wage bill will be less than the end of last season.

Well, if you read Musgrave's statement the club is having significant money disappearing out of the club which they cannot justify. This is pretty basic, no organisation has to pay bills without legal/contractual obligations. Therefore there are either some obligations Coxall and/or Sage have saddled the club with which they don't want to share (maybe on the boundaries of legality but morally offensive/asset stripping) or the most grossly incompetent management of finances possible.

Make your own mind up

More like Northern League ! Shades of Hereford United here

shes stated there have been £40000 "arrangement fees" on £100000 loans.......what else ???

If the next home match goes ahead then surely a mass protest against these Burglars.
Man up u soft fuckas instead of moaning on here.
Sage n Harri out ASAP.

The Mail finally wading in too

https://www.hartlepoolmail.co.uk/sport/ ... -1-8978306

the mail questioning the club ???....unbelievable jeff !!!!

We will be in that league soon.

My (usually very reliable) information is that the council have picked up the last two months salaries and Utility Alliance have also picked up another month.

That's the Mail printing questions, get in there and ask them and provide the answers, all of those questions could (probably have been) lifted off here.

The Echo published a long interview with Duxbury and gave her a platform to spin more tales of how much Sage had done for the club.

Journalism these days is poor to say the least, happier working within the confines of twitter and hinting that they know things. Spun along by pr people and frightened to ask real questions.

Shame Loughlin wasn't a bit more active this time last year

Kennedy from the mail admitted last week that he couldnt report on the fact we were under an embargo, kept calling it 'paperwork issues'.

Whose saying he cant report on that? The club?

No one seems to want to really get into why we have these problems, and when fans question them, we get called keyboard warriors or this time last year detectives.

freedom of information request to HBC ??? what [if any] taxpayers monies have been paid to HUFC in the past 12 months ???

His specialist subject is hindsight

My big fear is the next Home game vs Woking....how can we afford to stage it??

For a kick-off, there will be a far bigger Police Presence following the dafties with the flares (we are on our last warning for this btw) and the chew outside after the game (which DID happen)

Then theres the Utilities..cant run a ground without power, water, gas...Internet...phones...

Very very worrying if those bills haven't been paid.

At least one of the Hartlepool Forums (not a football one) is already onto this and theres a LOT of anger about it.

Even as a Hartlepool United fan I'm not happy about it. It would only ever have delayed the inevitable and has basically allowed the crooks to remain in charge longer. Maybe they thought it would afford them time to find a buyer for the club but let's face it, the club is beyond saving in it's current form.
The council should switch their efforts towards assisting the police now...

Mr I said on this forum months ago that the club would be in Administration by the end of January and people took the piss out of him and accused him and The Trust of scaremongering. Yet again it looks like he will be proved right.It sounds like him and Fireball have had a major falling out but as they seem to be the two main people that have accurately reported the facts about the club for the last 2 years and almost everything they have said or predicted has come true surely they can patch up their differences for the good of the club.
It looks like we are headed for a drop of at least one league and possibly more and I cant see anyone other than The Trust at the moment getting us through that even if it means them working with The Council and individual investors to put together a rescue package. Agree about the need for police involvement.

One of the Mails questions is

"Why has it taken so long for Hartlepool United’s problems to be unearthed?"

I field this one, because of Liam Kennedy cosying up to the latest regime repeatedly and having neither the backbone nor the appetite to ask any difficult questions or do any digging

Did a local journalist burgle your house or something unruly? You need to drop this thing with papers it’s tedious.

The financial problems were uncovered over a year ago on here even though people have had a fair idea of what’s been going on we have been powerless to stop it’s escalation to this point. What do you think a couple of local sports reporters could have done to change the situation? Remember the past two incumbents of the chairman’s seat are proven liars. What’s done is done moving forward we need to the press on our side. The Trust had lots of dialogue with Duxbury in the summer and she got them to urge people to hand over season ticket money. Everyone has been misled and bullshitted to while more and more money simply disappears. What could the Mail or Echo have done?

Mr I did, didnt he? As well as al the other things he has uncovered. Shame he didnt set up a friends group as he might not be the most hated man in "parts of" Hartlepool.

Only Pools could "attract" 3 sets of lying, thieving not nice people three times running.

No one has burgled my house, my criticism of them is always followed by your defense of them so I guess we are equally tedious.

What could they have done?

Well this is a long list which involves doing anything they haven't actually done.

Ill give you one though, I know of people in the town, season ticket holders, older fans that don't read the bunker. People that rely on the local rags for their info. These people haven't had all the information to decide whether the just giving page was a good idea or not. They have been mislead into thinking that 200k was to save Pools with any sort of decent local press coverage it could of been questioned and asked whether raising money for the people currently in charge was a good idea.

There is enough for a decent journalist to write about 3 books about in the last 2 years at Pools and most of it has gone over the local papers head.

How do you think these ‘difficult questions’ would have been answered?

As I said Duxbury sat with the Trust in the summer while they asked her loads of difficult questions and she talked them around with lies. Jeff Stelling said a couple of weeks ago that Backledge was a honorable man.

Everyone’s a victim of these twats.

I'm getting dragged back into this but I don't want to but here's my take.

Attempting to save HUFC in its current format without the sort of funding that Chris Musgrave brought is futile. I have some insight into the figures, Chris Musgrave has more. There are essentially three parts to this. Despite his indications otherwise it seems that Blakeledge is not going to walk away without a payoff. Then you have the operating costs, alleged to be £120k/130k/180k/190k a month, depending on who you listen to. Then you have the committed payments to Goldberg stooges and agents (think about this part).

Pools cannot trade through this because Patel, Foxx, Fraser, Goldberg Bean and a few others will all want their 'consultancy' invoices paying at 50k a pop. The thing is a swamp. It needs cleaning out and that can only be done by paying them off or starting again.

The worry is not the basic trading figures its the madness in the background. Sage appear to be still wanting their money back. Then you have the 'legacy' issues as described above. Then you have to trade out of a lunatic level of contractual committments with players , coaches, ex managers and the like.

Walk away for Christ sake, its the only way forward. Start again with a clean sheet of paper in whatever league it has to be in. At least then you will have a debt free community club. We have the ground and we have the goodwill. Do not hand over the Rachel money to Pools. Find a way to not do that.

The Trust cannot save the club as it stands, it just can't. it needs a couple of million minimum. Think about the funding figure that insolvency Geoff insisted on. £3m wasn't it. Do you think that figure was plucked out of the air?

Totally agree Mr I until people realise the club can not be saved and they only way forward is to withdraw any support

These people have greed as their motive we the supporters have the future.

Aye, cause shouting at them will make them give all the cash back wont it?

So if we owe £1.8m to Sage, then for this to be less than 75% of the total debt, the total of all other creditors (Goldberg's accomplices, utilities, small bills, HMRC etc) would need to be more than £600k.

If it is less than this figure, we could go into administration and force the non-Sage creditors to accept whatever % payoff that Sage would accept for a CVA. So if Sage were offered either (for example) £300k or nothing if we go bust, they would obviously take the £300k. 1/6 of the total outstanding amount would be applied to all other (non-football) creditors, and would mean that the other creditors would get a maximum total of £100k. Therefore the club changes hands for £400k, plus admin fees and we get a 10-point penalty.

All creditors would be settled apart from football ones, so all coaching and playing contracts would remain and all payments still owed to former managers and any other clubs, but at least we would have a clear view of what is required and the books would then be clean and understood..

Apart from the obvious fact that you'd don't have that amount of money, you would still have to trade to the end of the season so another [finger in the air] half a million.

That is very true. But if there was an investor who had roughly £1.5m put aside that they were willing to invest, then this would cover the takeover, the running costs to the end of the season and have about £600k left as contingency & to cover administrator fees etc..

Again Mr I is back with facts and the voice of reason.

How Goldberg isn't behind bars is beyond me.

I don't see the point of attending games anymore, Saturdays could be better used looking into forming a new club that will never fall victim to crooks again.

I suspect he would have thought of that Mr McT but there be dragons in the detail. I've seen some thing and I was horrified. Musgrave has seen all of it.

Does the NDA prevent 'something' being expanded on? Even in PMs? If they can't prove where it got out then what does it matter?

If it's true that the council and sponsors have paid 3 months wages, 6 months into the season then there is a serious amount of money been siphoned away from the club. No more, I'd rather start again than these parasites have another single penny.

I haven't signed one.

Ask yourself this question; do you trust the current ownership enough to give them cash and be sure it would be used for the right things?

Dunno like, thought that was our claim to fame!!