terenceanne wrote:Can any of you throw some light on who Football Ventures actually is and more importantly have they got major money to invest? I know nothing about them at all.
The short version is -
Football Ventures (Whites) seems to be a 'holding' company to take ownership of the club in such a way that Sports Shield BWFC and Inner Circle Investments were set to take ownership of the club for Holdsworth and Anderson respectively.
FV was originally set up by Basran and Sharon Brittan. Basran being someone who set up investment funds (people pay money into them and hope/expect to get a health interest rate return on their investment) and Brittan (the wife of the Pink Floyd drummer or something like that) being some sort of a property developer(?)/ investor in her own right.
Two later Directors were added - Michael James - the bloke with £5.5m already secured against the clubs hotel and Jeff Thomas who seems to be a serial Director in about 50 other companies.
Non of this made any real sense to me - why would these random people want to buy our club - until a poster on Wways (Benny) explained the thinking to be that the land is where the money is by building more shopping units to make the Middlebrook four sided and the football clubs car park to be made into Multi storeys to enable the land to be built on and still to have adequate car parking.
This would be the thing that pulled in the investment with the club really being an afterthought but with enough money being spent on it to keep us solvent and in existence.
The obvious question is whether shopping centres are still viable with the move away to on-line shopping but I guess as long as they are popular enough for the investors to get the returns they are looking for over the course of their investment, then that would be all they needed to invest.