Lets his HALO slip 15.30 in.

Speaking as a fan whose biggest interest has always been what's happening on the pitch, pleased to hear that Dave Challinor has a contract to the end of next season , that assuming things are still going well the chairman intends to speak to him about an extension in the new year, and that yes, he will back the manager in the transfer market if he needs to.

The off the pitch stuff will get a lot more attention I suspect. Raj wasn't holding back about the way negotiations with the 'American investors' was handled and from the sound of things it may have done serious damage to his relationship with Jeff Stelling. No wonder Jeff has been keeping such a low profile recently! Personally I don't blame him for refusing to write off his own investment in the club but many people who are careful when it comes to their own money will say otherwise!

As for negotiations with the council to take over the ground - can't see it ever happening and would rather it didn't.

He can’t even afford to employ someone to answer his phone for him. We’re doomed I tell you, doomed!!

Certainly did didnt he?

What exactly did he say to annoy anyone? As he said he wasn’t going to go away without some compensation he’s first and foremost a business man.

I cant think of one football club that has had success off the pitch whilst thing were so bad off it.

Singh has every right to protect his investment, I agree with that , and think most rational people would say the same.

It worries me that you don't want the council to take over the ground, I can't see it happening either, this is Hartlepool after all we are talking about. one of the most economically deprived towns in the UK, but I see that as our only way forward save for a white knight with money to burn riding in to save us. This is why I am very concerned about our future as a club, in terms of having a club at all or one that falls even further down the pyramid system. I think though , if we can just make a few improvements in the way we are run we have possibly found our level in the National League.

I think he meant for Pools to take over the ground or a new stadium which is what Raj said, adding new investors would expect a decent ground owned by the club.

That would definitely be a two edged sword, depending upon the integrity of future owners.

All in all I go with the argument put forward by Mr I and others, that the ground remaining in the council's hands is the nearest thing to a safeguard that Hartlepool will continue to have a football existence in the centre of the town. Even if the current chairman owns the club for the next 10 years and fulfils his stated ambition to take HUFC back to League One, there'll always be the concern about what comes after he's gone - what happens if another shyster like Coxall gets his hands on the club AND the ground?

I admit there are counter arguments - not least the way councils have been hammered by cuts in central government support over the last 10 years. It's not inconceivable that the council itself could decide to flog off Vitoria Park to developers at some point in the future.

lets hope the ground is never owned by club owners whoever they may be. the future of the club and fans is more secure that way. as for a club being well run on the pitch and badly run off it would only get you into a possible bury and macclesfield scene where both clubs may have gained recent promotions but were built on sand.

Hope the council keeps the ground.
Remember you can't be asset stripped if you have no assets!!!!!

Sounded like raj might go, if the council dont give him the ground, I dont fancy your chances of getting the ground raj, IOR where in talks for about 20 years.

if the club had owned the ground then either coxall or pam would have took out even more loans on it and we'd be even more screwed.

the longer the council owns it the better.

We dont want owners using it as leverage.

Yeah, there was no need for that. Otherwise the interview was fair enough and I welcome his participation.

I think Raj is looking for improvements to the ground which the club could use to improve their revenue streams.
Whether that be improvements to the existing stadium or built in to a new stadium.
In any circumstance I wouldn't like to see the council sell the ground to the club or anyone else. The only exception I would support is the Trust owning it.

Heard it all before, money is a loan, he wants ownership of the ground (probably on the cheap), he wants other investors, having a pop at the press etc etc etc

Not all pools fans are naive though. We shall see what's happens with raj,when the council block his hopes of getting the ground.

Good to see DC is on a decent contract.
I rate him highly but a couple of loan stars are needed to make the play offs.
N that's down to Raj to make it happen.
A bit surprised about his little social media outburst It's not the real world singy.

staying in a centrally positioned Vic is a must for me. the thought of some plastic lego stadium on the outskirts of the town fills me with dread and would be the end for me and a few others i,m sure.

wanting other investors to come along and help him has more or less been stated by him since walking through the door. its been the one consistent. his regard for fans seem to vary from those salt of the earth who can afford to give their money to the club to those in his eyes have never done a days work in their lives. all fans are equal but some more equal than others it seems.

With you entirely Mr Accrington.

Have I missed something I’ve never heard him say anything about supporters who have never done a days work in their lives.
Of course he would like someone to invest in the club let’s be honest he alone will never be able to put enough money in the club to reach the standards of IOR.

You cant have watched the video properly then!



It was the same at our place too, he had Gary Pallister as a club envoy trying to drum up this extra investment. Not owning the ground was always a stumbling block though.
He could have bought the arena for £2m, which is what the debt owed to Scott & Sizer was that was guaranteed on the ground. If I recall correctly, Raj tried to get it for around half that price saying that they should lose out just as he had when the club was put into administration under Houghton.

Have another listen from 15 minutes in if you want a bit of context. He's talking about "a few of the idiots on social media" criticizing him for the failed takeover talks and claiming he hasn't got any money left, people who "always know best how to run everything and they haven't done a decent day's work in their life."

It's clear Raj Singh hasn't done a day's media training in his life or he'd have chosen his words more carefully! Equally he's not having a pop at Pools fans in general but only at those who have taken to social media to criticise him for not stepping aside for the Yanks. He's bang out of order with that slur as he can't presume to know the individual work histories of people who criticise him, any more than they know about his financial affairs.

Incidentally the Wrexham takeover is finally moving forward with members of the Wrexham Supporters Trust voting in November on whether or not to accept the takeover offer from "The R.R. McReynolds Company, LLC." It looks like a great deal: the 2 R's are offering to invest £2 million in the club in "non-redeemable shares" in exchange for a complete takeover of Wrexham AFC. "The investment will be utilised for working capital purposes and for investing in the infrastructure, management, players and facilities of WAFC as the buyer sees fit." In addition, the Supporters Trust will retain the lease of the Racecourse Ground and the new owners will pay the ground's owners (the local university) via a sub-lease lasting 25 years.
https://www.leaderlive.co.uk/news/18832 ... p-forward/

This deal makes more sense than one for Pools ever did. The Yanks are paying literally "a peppercorn" for Wrexham, so their £2 million is new money for investment. The Wrexham Supporters Trust secures the future of their club and is relieved of the financial burden of running it - at the price of losing control. Nobody is being asked to give up a personal investment of £2.3- £2.4 million (what Raj says he has already put into HUFC) or indeed the £100k which, again according to Raj, is the sum total of Jeff Stelling's investment.

Yes I see what I never took up. What he should have said was there are people criticising him who have never run a business.

For him to be able to say that he would have to know their history, as Mr Hogans says.
In football everybody is vulnerable to the whims and fancies of the fans I'm afraid. it is part of the territory.
Fans can love you one minute and hate you the next and it doesn't take a lot to turn them.
It has always been thus and I can't see it changing.
Making the comments that he made was totally unnecessary and I'm sure he now sees that.
He is inviting criticism with remarks like that, which seems a bit silly for someone who appears to be frustrated by some of the criticism he has been given.
I am happy with the job he is trying to do for the club and wish him all the best. He just needs to pick and choose who he takes notice of.

agreed, but anyone should always be careful of criticising fans lack of work in a town like hartlepool with its history of unemployment. wonder why he thinks there are so many exiled poolies about. doubt many left for the hatred of the town itself.

If i was the owner of a football club and somebody did not come directly to me
With talk of investment, I would be pissed at them also.
And would not take them seriously as well.

Its like wanting to buy a newsagents and talking the paperboy about it.

In other words, although it pains you to say it, you agree with me. I am one of the others, though obviously Mr I thought of this great common sense idea long before me and anyone else.

Singh comes across as a very bitter man. This time last season I had ploughed 600 quid into the club, currently I have ploughed £9.99 into the club. If I am one of the idiots he refers to then the club will be getting no more money from me until Singh either apologises or leaves. Also I have done more work in a week than probably Singh has in a lifetime. Proper work not wining and dining in swanky hotels whilst discussing dodgy business deals. The bloke might have made a success of his life financially, but he couldn't run a football club for toffee, we will see this at first hand over the next 12 months.

Mr Hogan quotes me and to elaborate...

The council owning the ground is an insurance policy. The council aren't going to use it as collateral but an owner might. Raj Singh may at some point sell the club and then the new owners may secure funding underpinned by the deeds to the ground. Then we are in the pocket of a finance company.

It might not happen but why take the risk? Why any owner is obsessed about ownership when they're paying around £1500 a month for the rent of a football stadium is beyond me. Unless of course there are alternative motivations.

If the worst happens, and I believe at some point it will, we have a ground of league standards. Darlo have pretty much caught us up starting without a ground but its took them the best part of a decade. Had they have still owned Feethams they would be a league club now. We might want to take some lessons from their experiences.

The security the club has is that it has virtually no assets.
As said before no assets = no asset strippers to destroy the club.
The council must maintain ownership.
But the vultures circle.

[quote="Mr Irrelevant"

Why any owner is obsessed about ownership when they're paying around £1500 a month for the rent of a football stadium is beyond me. Unless of course there are alternative motivations.

trust no one especiaaly owners of football clubs, used car dealers and estate agents. in fact how many owners of clubs from our league up to the premier league actually do own the clubs grounds. there are far less than we think.

Raj can't be trusted. End of!

I keep reading all the posts regarding not trusting Raj and they may be right I don’t know but what would have happened if he hadn’t come in? OK he is not pouring millions into the club but we are still going and not ending up like Bury, Maccelsfield, Rushden etc.

He's loaning the club money.

He's not putting any money in that he wont 1 day try and get back.

He would be mad not to 'loan' the club the money. He must know that he has little chance of getting it back, but may at some point write it off against tax elsewhere in his business empire. Didn't IOR run a similar process. If we went bust he would be just another creditor who gets .1p in the £.

It is clearly beneficial for the owner to loan money than it is to invest money as it does offset losses and profits elsewhere. Jeff’s money went in personally but Mr Singh’s money into C18 that is loaned to Pools comes from a second company, Prestige Investments, which has other operations that could be more profitable. It does however leave a loss making, non-league club very much in the red though.

A note to the post above, if we go bust C18 won’t get any penny in the pound because we’d have gone bust, but even in the event that we went into administration it would see us kicked out of the national leagues because their rules require 100% payback of debts. CVAs of less than 100% aren’t allowed in the NLs.

Even if the club accepted the need for a (minimum) two league demotion for a less than 100% CVA, as major creditor Clarence 18 would get to make the decision as to whether to accept less than what’s owed or not. And nobody knows what that would be.

Maybe so but hes asking for redic amounts to invest in the club, what did he want for 10% 200k?

Despite what he says the americans offered very good money to buy pools but they were met with a lot of obstacles. Mostly him wanting every penny back. Which isnt me saying he shouldnt. But is me simply pointing out again he has never invested in the club but just loaned.

Was it just Mr Maguire who used the terms 'donation' and 'gift'; mirroring the behaviour down route 66?

That’s a good point, Maguire certainly used the ‘donation’ word on plenty of occasions but I’m not sure I’ve really heard that from Mr Singh.

Programme notes vs Solihull, the Pools podcast (episode 6) are two examples from MM. What’s probably most unusual is that at the shareholders AGM back in July 2019 the shareholders present were told that C18 was to increase its shareholding in Pools from around 6.9 million to 9 million shares... except when the accounts were published earlier this year that didn’t happen. When I asked Maguire why it didn’t happen he had no explanation.

That difference, 2.1 million shares, is maybe what the club is valued at or how much turnover the club has in a season or two?, hence 10% being worth roughly 200k.
Running a professional football club is a very expensive business, for example a higher paid pro may be on something in the region of 40/50k per annum, times that by 15 to 20(Manager and coaches on top) and you can see how much is going solely on players/staff wages.

You cant seriously be comparing Raj Singh with IOR???
Did what happened at Darlo pass you by or something?

I don't have a problem with him finances being structured as loans. In reality he's lending himself money. Whats the difference between lending money to yourself or giving money to yourself? It's all just smoke and mirrors for tax benefits.

I still believe that Raj Singh acted in good faith and he was open from day one that he expected the community to be in partnership with him.

Nevertheless, the ground should always remain a council asset because of unforseen circumstances like liquidations trying to get their hands on it or any future asset strippers. Has Pools owned the ground during the Coxberg era we would be playing at Grayfields enclosure.

and that would be regarded as being lucky. could have gone down the new brighton road as not having a club at all at any level.

I was simply comparing the route both took to putting money into the club. When he pulled the plug on Darlo I presume he lost all the money he had loaned or did he find a way to avoid that?

When he pulled the plug he said he didnt want a penny back, then held the club to ransom because he wanted his money back, holding back the football share. Hence the need to change club name and relegation to the northern league despite taking on the football debt he left the club with. That was paid back in full whilst he ended up getting some of his losses back by way of cuts of sell on fees paid when Dan Burn and Michael Smith transferred clubs.
The man cant be trusted, if he said it was daytime I would go outside and check.

It's nite time I've just checked.
But i think I know we're u coming from.
What shall our new name be.
Hartlepools Athletic.

Bump. Same threats/ promises as the most recent interview.

Different month, same raj.

Of course he doesnt want to deal with the the trust asking questions, it's an uncomfortable question for him as he attaches more loans against the club, of course he doesnt want the trust money, he wants the HOOC money from john Walter Mitty Shithead and his little band of merry men cos that money comes 4 free so why give shares away when you can have free money.

Things are going great on the pitch, not sure why he felt the need to do an interview just to slag off former employees with almost 20 years of service.

That was pretty disgusting of him.

It will end badly, mark my words.