If Eddie Davies thought newspapers 'a necessary evil' one can but wonder what he thought of Twitter.
So called football finance expert Kieran Maguire was on Twitter on Friday re-tweeting what seems to have been a tweet from Marc Iles that I cannot find on Iles Twitter page. Here it is:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] PriceOfFootball Retweeted Marc Iles
'If Bolton owner Ken Anderson, who paid himself £525,000 & his son £125,000 but salaries have gone unpaid in November, thinks that banning the local journalist from the club is good management, governance & PR, he is wrong. Job of the press is to question those in power.'Let's just take Superagent first. His Twitter account has been quiet since 6 December which is unusual. But Ken Anderson declared, as he should have done, a payment of £125,000 to Athos Group in the year ended 30 June 2017 confirming also that the Athos Group is owned by a family member.
Lets assume that the Athos Group is a one-man band consisting solely of Lee Anderson with no other employees and no business expenses. Is £125K excessive compared to the costs of paying unrelated agents for the same services? Having regard to agents costs the club has had to pay in the past, I'd have to cast some doubt on that.
Now lets turn to the £525K. Marc Iles knows (because I personally raised the issue in his presence about six months ago) that there's an evident link between the £525K (before tax) consultancy fee and the £472K needed to pay off Dean Holdsworth and reach an accomodation with Blumarble (including agreement to reduce the interest charges by a significantly larger sum).
Interestingly, the audited 2017 accounts show again (it was first reported in the 2016 accounts) another amount of £250K paid to Sports Shield BWFC in May 2016 which seems to be additional to the £472K.
So why has Marc Iles raised no questions on any of this? Has he, in reality, been playing to the gallery of uninformed hotheads until Ken Anderson could no longer tolerate the personal abuse of himself and his family that were the inevitable and predictable consequence?
Will it just be the Anderson family that pays the price of BN carelessness or will it have accelerated and magnified the financial problems and concerns the club and its employees clearly face? I'm concerned that it may have done exactly that.