When tax is too taxing.

1. The debt due to Ken Anderson
   
2. The security for the debt due to Ken Anderson.
   

Ten Bobsworth wrote:There are two components here, Sluffy:

1. The debt due to Ken Anderson
   
2. The security for the debt due to Ken Anderson.
   

Lets take the second first.

Blumarble's loan (£4m plus interest not £5m) was secured in several ways which are set out in the files of each of the relevant companies providing the security and setting out the nature of that security.

The BWFC file sets them out in charges numbered 58 and 59.

At or about the same time as BM were paid off, two new charges/securities were created in BWFC numbered 60 and 61 taking the total number of outstanding charges on BWFC to 9. The earliest dates back to 2002.

There's a similar situation in Burnden Leisure.

There are several assets involved in the charges and there will also be a pecking order where an asset is charged to more than one person. i.e. whose charge gets first dibs.

The security for Ken Anderson's loan is numbered 61 in BWFC, number 23 in Burnden Leisure, number 8 in Bolton Whites Hotel, number 15 in Bolton Sporting Ventures and number 13 in Bolton Sports Village.

All of these charges were security for the money KA had borrowed off ED to pay off Blumarble which, with discounted interest, would have been c. £4.5m.

But that wasn't all he borrowed off ED. KA says it was £7.5m and I believe him. I don't think he could have kept the club afloat without it prior to the sale of Gary Madine in January 2018.

I think ED had lent him £2.5m as part of an arrangement made with KA in March 2016 and handed  over by ED between July and December 2017.

I also don't think the £4.5m came to the club but was settled direct to Blumarble, possibly via ED's lawyers. The figure of £5m may also include some other outstanding bills and expenses.

The administrator's explanation of all this is not satisfactory in my view and appears to rely on the fact that a journal entry had not been put through the books to reflect what had happened.

Whichever way you look at it, the amounts said to be owed to creditors in total or to KA individually do not stack up and only start to make sense when adjusted to reflect KA's claim, which incidentally is also borne out by what EDT claimed was owed to them.

Given that scenario, its easy to see why KA and his legal team brought the hotel into the equation.

Sluffy wrote:

Ten Bobsworth wrote:There are two components here, Sluffy:

1. The debt due to Ken Anderson
   
2. The security for the debt due to Ken Anderson.
   

.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not disputing that the charges are on the books as you have listed, what I questioned is how can you secure against assets that have already been secured against up to their maximum value already shown in the accounts based on professional valuations?

Security is taken against assets in the hope that, if all else fails, the lender can get his money back by the sale of the assets. But assets go up and down in value and when push comes to shove they sometimes are worth less than they cost or less than they were last valued at. In the case of BWFC the fixed assets were in the books at cost less depreciation which was, as it happens, substantially higher than the loans secured against them.

Maybe you can - which answers my question but I was clearly under the belief that you couldn't.

If Rubins ruled out the two loans of £2.5m and £5m - which apparently you imply they did, then how come they stated that Anderson did indeed have secured creditor status but for only £1.6m?  It can't be ruled out yet shown as a sum outstanding to him at the same time can it?

I don't think Rubins ruled out the £5m loan. They simply ignored it and treated the security charge as being against the £2.5m loan.

I also suspect that KA took some money out after the sale of Madine as a fee/commission and a reward for maintaining Championship status and that that was treated by Rubins, not as a fee, but as a reduction of the £2.5m. This was also likely to be the subject of dispute between KA and Rubins

I don't doubt Eddie loaned Ken the £7.5m and I don't doubt it was used to pay off BM and keep the club running but I question how this £7.5m was abled to be secured on a business that appeared not to have assets to the value free of having charges already set against them?

The fixed assets were in the books of BWFC at a depreciated cost of £26.8m in June2017. Well in excess of the loans secured against them at book value

Maybe that is fine whilst the business is trading but when it slips into insolvency then the assets of it are finite and obviously there is a pecking order to who is paid until the assets are no more to satisfy the rest.

To my mind Ken was a secured creditor but only for what Rubins deemed was available to be secured against the assets available after the BM loan was settled, which was just the £1.6m.

Or looking at it another way, if BM wasn't settled and Eddie had not loaned Ken the £5m to do so, then BM would only have received £1.6m from the Administrator because the secured creditors total of all those who registered a charge was greater than the assets at insolvency.

No, for the reasons explained above

Tbh I'm not really deeply concerned anymore as a decision as been made and everyone has since accepted it.  The net result to my mind was that Eddie sold the club to Holdsworth for reasons known unto himself, knowing Holdsworth could not fund the club.  Eddie personally financed the club behind the scenes and ultimately paid off the £5m shortfall for running costs he had left when selling to Holdsworth, which brought BM into the picture.  So in a sense balance was achieved as if he had bunged in the £5m in the first place non of the shite that followed would probably have happened.

He didn't really sell the club at all, least of all to Holdsworth. ED was between a rock and a hard place and prepared for administration. I expect ED would have known that Holdsworth was going to be of no help but Ken Anderson was a different proposition. Whatever his previous reputation, he was experienced in handling insolvency situations and offered a chance of avoiding immediate administration whilst buying more time to try to get someone with deeper pockets to come in. ED  was ready to chuck in another £2.5m to help it happen. It would have cost nearly as much to put it into admin.

Selling for a quid isn't selling, its giving it away and, although it must have nearly broke his heart, it was the best he could make of a bad job.

I believe Ken did a marvellous attempt at keeping the club afloat for the amount of time he did and was never here to put his personal wealth at stake.  I don't believe he raped and pillaged the club at all and whatever he took out of it was reasonable it terms of the football world.

Anderson didn't benefit from the £7.5m loans from Eddie, the money went into the club to keep it going.

Agreed. I don't believe he took out the £525K that proved to his many detractors that he was a rogue. That was really part of the cost of buying out Holdsworth but I do think he took out a larger amount in 2018. Small compared to what the likes of Ben Amos cost the club but a lot of money if you were one of the small businesses that ended up having to write off 2/3rds of their debt.

So in conclusion Eddie was the benefactor that he was although sadly Iles and many others don't seem to recognise how much he truly was, Anderson didn't rape and pillage the club, nor gain excessively from it like Iles and most everyone else believed he had and Holdsworth who clearly was the one to screw the club is still seen by Iles the ST and most others to be a hero.

Agreed again. Iles, the BN and the ST were worse than clueless throughout and I very much doubt that any of them have learned much if anything throughout the entire process.

Ten Bobsworth wrote:I think its interesting, Sluffy, that Iles and the BN have never really got close to reporting the facts in any kind of objective or considered way and, as I have said before, I think that goes back a long way.

If you had any understanding at all of the financial facts of life at BWFC, it would be quite impossible to claim that the Reebok stadium was funded by Gordon Hargreaves (Iles) or that the funds from the sale of Nicholas Anelka weren't re-invested (Glendinning).

No, these falsehoods stem from a total mismatch between what had actually happened at BWFC and empty-headed gossip circulating in the corridors of BN HQ almost throughout the Davies era. The national newspapers were every bit as bad but they weren't as close to the action and have short attention spans. Whose really interested in Bolton Wanderers apart from a few thousand Bolton Wanderers supporters?

I suspect that you are right about David Wheater and that the strike in the summer of 2018 was stoked up by pea-brained pillocks without a thought in their heads of the long-term damage it might have on creditors or the more modestly paid and loyal staff of BWFC

But, if we return to the start of this thread, lets just take another short look at what's happening at FGR, one of our probable opponents next season. The t-shirt issuing, ripped jeans-wearing, mutton dressed as lamb millionaire, Dale Vince, is constantly in the media on his self-sacrificing 'mission' but which newspaper has published the fact that over the last nine years Vince's taxpayer-subsidised Ecotricity Group has reported losses of £22m whilst Vince has spent £13.5m on Forest Green Rovers and drawn another £9m in interest-free loans to himself?

Its Friday the thirteenth today, so lets hope us oldies can avoid COVID-19 a bit longer. I've been self-isolating from BSE-15 all season.

LETTER OF THE DAY: Dale Vince's attitude is 'tiresome, patronizing and downright insulting.'

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T.R.O.Y. wrote:Everyone should pay their taxes in full, and the government should be prosecuting those who don’t and closing loopholes. We all know this never has (and never will be) a key focus of the Tory party though. 

Having spent 10 years cutting the NHS putting the focus on footballers just doesn’t sit quite right with me. Why footballers?

T.R.O.Y. wrote:Everyone should pay their taxes in full, and the government should be prosecuting those who don’t and closing loopholes. We all know this never has (and never will be) a key focus of the Tory party though. 

Having spent 10 years cutting the NHS putting the focus on footballers just doesn’t sit quite right with me. Why footballers?