steelboy

That's a very good point that no one in the Society has addressed. The suggestions about a takeover from various places involving new shares effectively amounts to giving over a controlling interest for free. That might not be the case but it's went very quiet on the takeover front.

Usually in fitba you get what you pay for. It's been said that the women's team costs the club £250,000 a year. It's not sustainable to be aiming to have a first team breaking even and an academy running at profit while carrying a women's team that is always going to be loss making. The tail is wagging the dug.

I just had a look at the SWPL table and it's noticeable that three of the clubs we are chasing for the top 6 don't have a top division women's team. That's surely handing St Mirren, Dundee and Kilmarnock a financial advantage over us? If the Society is going to be asking the support to dig deeper then they have to make sure we aren't throwing money away. There's been a lot of talk about Kilmarnock getting KVV but when you consider how much more we spend on the pitch plus training facilities over them then it's obvious how they can afford it. It gives them a clear competitive and financial advantage and it would cost us nothing to try and get the rules changed to even that out. To actually have any say on these issues the society would need to have the majority on the club board. It's not feasible to be asking members to put in money to be effective junior partners to people who are putting in nothing.

Big Bevis has been superb recently. I'm struggling to see us signing two centre backs better than him in the summer. Keep him and replace Butcher.

Let's hope history isn't about to repeat itself......

I'm not sure that's the case. Nevin was overly generous with contracts but the bottom line is he working to a budget until Boyle pulled the rug from him. We were pretty much put into Admin at the exact same time Boyle founded Zoom Airlines. I don't think the timing is a coincidence and it looks like he just decided to stop spending money on a football club and sank it into an airline instead.

Halliday on the radio saying Casey should have been booked. If anything it's a foul to us. Has anybody got the fine list from earlier on in the season? I'd say that's about 6 weeks wages.

You get told as a kid you get hurt pulling out tackles. McAusland hung a leg in with studs up and turned his head away. Completely his own fault.

I'm getting censored. Already posted about the game.

Best performance in years. Brilliant from everyone. Credit to Kelly for stepping up a level and I hope everyone can acknowledge Mugabi has a bit of quality in him. I'm fed up hearing lazy stereotypes about a nice guy and a mistake in him. He's our best defender.

Foul was on SOD.

There was an angle that showed SOD didn't touch the ball at all so it was a pen. There's no point moaning about VAR when SOD is defending like a collapsed ironing board. Crazy defending with Casey in a good position.

SOD slid, didn't get the ball and caught Silva. Stonewall pen. 3 out the last 4 games he's cost us a goal.

We've not been able to keep hold of our better players for the past 30 years. Lambert and McKinnon leaving on Bosmans changed everything. The question isn't about keeping hold of our better players it's about how to do we make sure we are signing enough Premiership level players every summer to sustain us. People need to define what 'compete' actually means us for us. There is no outside investment which puts us on a level playing field financially with Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen. Our optimistic aims are always going to be Top six, grab a Euro spot and have a good cup run whether fan owned or not.

Exactly. Also we have to be aware that any party with a controlling interest has many different options for extracting cash from the club. The Indonesian/Australian bid which is being offered supposedly involves advanced scouting software which no doubt the club would have to pay to use. It's easy enough to put money in with one hand and take it back out with another. A good example of this is Mike Ashley at Rangers getting them to sign a merchandise deal with Sports Direct that basically robbed them of millions.

£333,000 a year for 6 years for the controlling interest of the club. Utterly ridiculous. If this is true and McMahon and Weir are genuinely pushing for it then serious questions need to be asked.

It's a strange world where people who have been going to Fir Park aren't football people but an Indonesian conglomerate or an American TV company would be considered to be. The board have said at the AGM that potential investors want the controlling interest in the club. That opens us up to selling the stadium, taking on debt and money flowing out the club to the new owners. A minority shareholding and a seat on the board won't make any difference if investors with a majority want to go down that road.

The Well Society is legally an Industrial and Provident Society and each member owns 1 voting share. It's illegal not to allow members a vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_society

It would be crazy if they just let people buy a vote for a fiver. £300 was the price of membership when it started so it probably still is. I'm going to email and ask for a copy of the constitution.

I felt it was a poorly worded question. The 'no investment' option was phrased as being permanently binding and the 'investment' option was completely vague. Phase 1 of McMahon and Weir's PR operation(still need to find out who paid for it) to end fan ownership has been successful but they will need to be more honest and open going forward. There seems to have been a big effort to protect the identity of the American investor while the Australian one has been more public. I'm guessing phase 2 will be more scare stories about auditors and introducing the Americans. At the moment it's not even clear if they are talking about an individual buying us or a TV production company. The main outcome of this vote is that we won't have a CEO in place anytime soon so expect our squad building to become even more of a farce.

It still counts as part of the loss in the annual accounts. That's not how P+L, it still counts as expenditure even if you use borrowed money. Also I don't think it's true that it was only for infrastructure. Covid loans to every other business were used to cover wages. It's also a bit of a joke that we have to pay this back but the SRU got a £15 million grant no strings attached. Working class Vs middle class sport.....

Why would the Society agree to wipe out the value of it's shareholding for no return? That's giving the club including millions in assets away for absolutely nothing to a foreign entity. Madness.

Hopefully we can shut this down this week then appoint a CEO who can make a start on the summer transfer business.

The loss was all down to Burrows completely pointless stadium and pitch redevelopments. The people who are leaving the board are the ones trying to force through a sale. I wouldn't be surprised to see them reappear if the Well Society gives up the shares. We don't have a CEO because McMahon and Weir want to sell a club they don't actually own. There are serious questions about who the CEO and Chairman have actually been representing these last few months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakrie_Group This is the conglomerate who own Brisbane Roar. From their Wikipedia Page Football club[edit] Brisbane Roar (2012-present)[edit] Bakrie Group, through PT. Pelita Jaya Cronus acquired A-League title-holders Brisbane Roar FC in 2011. Bakrie Group initially purchased 70% of the club shares, but in 2012 the Football Federation Australia (FFA) announced that the Bakrie Group has acquired 100% ownership of A-League club Brisbane Roar FC.[35] In May 2016, Brisbane Roar faced an administrative and financial turbulences when the team ownership held investment in the club, resulting in Brisbane Roar failure to pay staff and players.[36] C.S. Visé (2011-2014)[edit] C.S. Visé, a second division league Belgium football club was acquired by Bakrie Group in 2011,[37] during Bakrie's ownership Indonesian youth players like Syamsir Alam, Manahati Lestusen and Alfin Tuasalamony were called to play for the club.[38] C.S Vise was eventually sold by Bakrie Group in 2014.[39] https://asiatimes.com/2021/06/indonesia-tycoons-name-is-mud-over-unpaid-disaster-dues/ JAKARTA – Fifteen years since a flood of toxic mud and gas spewing out of a breached natural gas well cut road links and forced the mass evacuation of East Java villagers, firms controlled by coal tycoon Aburizal Bakrie have still to pay at least US$100 million in compensation for causing the disaster. Although the flow from the world’s largest mud volcano has been contained by levees since late 2008 – and is now expelling only a fraction of the 120,000 cubic meters a day it was at its height – experts expect the after-effects will continue to be a problem for the next 30 years. They warn that because the levees are only made of compacted earth, there is still a real danger of heavy monsoonal rain or increased seismic activity triggering a catastrophic collapse, unleashing an avalanche of mud across an even wider area. “It is mind-boggling to me that the mud is still flowing,” says one source who was involved in the project at the time of the eruption. “There was a lot of evidence in the seismic of a sub-surface feature, but we thought we were drilling a reef, not a volcano.” Mud volcanoes are not volcanoes in the accepted sense because they don’t produce magma. They are normally formed when hot water from deep beneath the surface mixes with subterranean mineral deposits and is forced upwards through a geological fault. Officials said last December they were still considering ways to collect on the $54.8 million loan taken out by the Bakrie-owned PT Lapindo Bratas and subsidiary PT Minarak Lapindo Jaya to recompense the government for providing the bridging finance to compensate many of the victims. Lapindo claims to have already paid as much as 8 trillion rupiah ($560 million) as part of the emergency response and victim resettlement, but the State Audit Agency (BKS) says it now remains liable for 1.5 trillion rupiah ($105 million), covering the principal, interest payments and accumulated penalties built up over the past decade.