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From Grimsby Town Supporters Trust:
Dear fellow football supporter,
This is an appeal on behalf of the Grimsby Town Supporters Trust.
As some of you may already know, Grimsby Town currently have a major financial problem (for a club of their size and status) which threatens to force the club into administration. The Inland Revenue requires £720,000 in outstanding tax debts to be paid in the next three years if the club is to avoid a winding up order. The Inland Revenue accepts that this tax debt was in no way caused by financial mismanagement but by the collapse of ITV Digital and its subsequent consequences.
At the time of the ITV Digital collapse, the club was playing old Division 1 football and was therefore paying large sums on long contracts to most of the squad. Due to the limited size of Grimsby's fan base, the collapse caused major problems and, after maintaining Division 1 status for one year, the club was inevitably relegated being unable to compete financially (many of you were no doubt at Blundell Park on that very day, suffering the same fate!). The following season, Grimsby Town were relegated again and now play in League 2.
The football club has launched a 'Keep The Mariners Afloat' campaign and The Supporters Trust has given itself a target of raising £120,000 over the next three years to go towards this. Every penny the Trust raises goes directly into buying shares in the football club, giving greater ownership of the club to its supporters. The Trust has forged a good relationship with the club and is aiming to achieve boardroom representation in the near future.
Grimsby is an unfashionable club and always has been but it means a lot to its loyal band of supporters who follow the team around the country in great numbers each week. As Grimsby Town do not have a large fan base, we are asking you and fans of all clubs to help us in a very small but effective way.
The Supporters Trust has set up a telephone and text number that you can call and by doing so make a modest donation of just £1.50.
We would ask you to call 0906 345 0459 from a land line to hear a message from a very well known footballing legend who is a former Doncaster, Southampton, Sunderland, Grimsby and England-Assistant Manager. Calls to this number cost £1.50 a minute with £1.31 of that going to buy shares in Grimsby Town for the Supports Trust.
Alternatively, you can text your support for the Keep The Mariners Afloat Campaign by sending 'GTST 1' to 88199
By texting this number you will be charged £1.50 on your mobile bill of which £1.00 goes directly to the Trust.
If you wish to donate a larger sum or even join the Trust for one year, please follow the link to the Supporters Trust website at the bottom of this message where you will find more information.
If you know of any other frequently used message boards for your club, please copy this message on there and ask people to help.
Thank you very much for your support. Remember, any money received goes DIRECTLY to buying shares in Grimsby Town for the fans and not straight to the tax man.
Thank you, best of luck in your battle again this season!
GTST
================== Previously ===============
Keep the Mariners Afloat!
20-Jan-2005
from the BBC:
Grimsby Town are launching a new appeal entitled 'Keep the Mariners Afloat' - which is aiming to raise £420,000 to keep the League Two club going.
Planned initiatives include increasing attendances and the non-matchday use of Blundell Park's facilities.
'Our chances of success, and even survival, are being seriously threatened by a legacy of debts,' chairman Peter Furneaux explained. 'We have to take the possibility of administration as a real threat.'
He added: 'This route invokes an automatic 10-point deduction by the Football League, and this could affect the club's divisional status. But there is no guarantee the club would survive administration, although the current tax debts could be satisfied. The board hold the view that administration would be the last option.'
=============== Previously ================
Winding up order possible
30-Sep-2004
Electronicfishcake (rivals link below) website reports that information received from a number of sources, suggests that Grimsby Town Football Club could cease to exist after October this year,if it is correct that the club have not paid, or are unable to pay, an outstanding debt to the Inland Revenue.
Rumours of Grimsby Town having substantial commitments to the taxman have been around since the summer but more recent information suggests that the Inland Revenue already have a winding up order on the Club or will apply for one in October.
The amount of the outstanding debt is claimed to be close to £500,000.
The information we have is that earlier this year, the board did have discussions to determine whether an administration order should be applied for.
If the club do apply for an administration order it will most likely be granted but that in itself will present even more problems.
An administrator would be appointed. The board members would lose their powers to control the future of the club although they will still have to fulfil their statutory obligations.
The administrators responsibility would be to find ways to secure the funds to pay off all the clubs outstanding liabilities, not just the Inland Revenue's and that would be expected to increase the total cash requirement to be a great deal more than that outstanding to the tax man.
That would make it exceedingly difficult for the administrator to find the necessary funds to bring the club out of administration, which means he would have to sell off all the club assets, which would almost certainly place the club in a position where they could not continue very long even if they came out of administration.
If the club did go into administration, the connection with John Fenty, whose personal financial commitments to the club are already around £2,000,000, would be broken and, it would be a very hard task to find someone else to take his place. The other directors too are understood to have injected £50,000 each.
But all is not quite lost.
The club have a number of options.
They could come to some arrangement with the tax man. (It seems likely that path has already been trodden.)
They could appeal to the public for support by purchasing the 280,000 shares still available at £1.00 each and hold fundraising activities.
Persuade John Fenty to foot the bill once again and pay off the taxman to protect the investments he has already made in the club. That is a very big ask but his past commitments do indicate his passion for the club.
Find willing partners to enter into personal guarantees to cover the outstanding amount and borrow the money.
It is also possible that the club already have a plan.
Those who have followed the fortunes of Grimsby Town have learned the hard way not to write them off too quickly and are quite used to being surprised when the chips are down.
Recently, there has been some capital invested in the creation of the Lawrie McMenemy facility, which was one of the contributing reasons for the resignation of a director who wanted it to be the Alan Buckley facility but failed, which eventually proved to be the last straw. (But that is another story.)
The creation of this facility was obviously a commercial decision to improve the then current facility and increase the income.
But would the club have committed funds to that project if the clock was ticking regarding their future if they were not prepared?
The answer to that may determine the future of Grimsby Town Football Club!
So far, the club have not responded to requests for their comments.
====================== Previously ======================
The Grimsby Telegraph has reported the fans are concerns over the clubs future.
Grimsby Town FC is being kept afloat by its board members as yet another club finds itself in a desperate financial situation. The directors after criticism from the fans, have responded by stating that the club would go under if they left and withdrew their personal financial support.
The board as a group are funding the club to the tune of £1-million and are also behind a further £200,000 bank guarantee. They also revealed that players and staff would not have been paid at Christmas had the board not themselves stumped up cash for the salaries.
The matter has been made worse after legal complications stopped a promised £330,000 loan from the Football Foundation. This money was to help mitigate the loss of the ITV Digital contract but it was stopped as it had already been factored into the cash flow.
The current board, who say they would welcome anyone prepared to put money into the club, are saddled with contracts and debts from previous administrations.
But like so many other clubs they no longer have the ITV Digital money to pay for them. As a result money which could go on team-building is being used to service debt not incurred by the current board.
While fans find it easy to call for the heads of directors, they would actually be sounding the death knell of the club.
'We are fans too,' one board member told me, 'otherwise we would not be doing this.'
