Tonsilitis

Is a question of who has the balls to do it first really. = who will accept the automatic relegation that will go with you mean! Its a vicious circle!

Given the way the club is conducting its finances, the directors - is Massone a director? - are putting themselves at severe risk of some insolvency practitioner pursuing them personally on a wrongful trading rap. Basically, insolvency law says that if you don't run the company in a manner expected of a reasonably competent director, you can be held personally liable for all or part of the company's debts. You can bet your bottom dollar that if wages are not getting paid, neither is the VAT and PAYE plus its obvious that the ordinary suppliers are not getting their money either. Her majesty's government will have no compunction about appointing a liquidator! I hope for his sake, Mr Massone has good professional advice because he could find himself in serious sh1t which bailing out back to Italy will not protect him from. EU directives say that each members insolvency rules will be respected and he can be got at in Italy also.

He does not need to appear in front of the SFL for them to know what happened to that money. Livi never got it as a creditor has it arrested in the hands of the SFL.

You could get your lawyer to arrest the money owed to you in the hands of the SFA on the dependence of an action for recovery against Livingston

OK I overlooked the Insolvency Act 2000 Moratorium in anticipation of a CVA. However, the directors have to put a meaningful voluntary arrangement scheme to the court in support of the moratorium. An essential element of any voluntary arrangement is that the company has some form of underlying viable business to be rescued. How can Livingston demonstrate that entering hteir third insolvency procedure in what? 10 years? Even the dimmest Sheriff is going to see through a moratorium application not supported by a rescue plan which has some chance of success. They have no assets other than the players and selling them to an already impoverished football sector is not going to be easy. As for the HMRC rules, I do a lot of cases for the Revenue and have not come across the MP rule (I'm nopt arguing with you though) but I am not sure what the complaint is about. Livi owe circa £130k in PAYE

We'll just have to see. I thought it was happening this week but it may be that it is deferred for a week or two thanks to the league hand out.

The only way the club can organise that is through an administration order. A creditors moratorium is informal and binds the creditors to nothing. My information is that there will be an admin order imminently.

The SFL handout this week might keep things going another week but £10k is only around a week/two weeks wages. It will not make much of a debt in the £50k electricity bill or the £150k PAYE arrears.

An opposite view is that if we had turned full time at that time we could have become an established SPL side although I will confess that clubs who were of similar size to us in the 70s/early 80s like Motherwell and Killie all nearly went bust. The model for me that teams like Morton should aspire to is Inverness Caley.

That was indeed the case - for us the Andy Ritchie era, etc. Even then though, that was a bit of a one off and part time in the premier was just not sustainable. Its even less so now!

You are correct that most SPL clubs have addressed the stupidity of their payroll budgets but that is a relatively recent phenomena. Most clubs tried to at least be able to semi compete with the old firm and spent money on has been foreigners at the expense of a whole generation of Scottish footballers. Had Falkirk been in the SPL then, they would have done the same or got relegated. Its the trap that bigger and better clubs than Livi fell into and was almost the death of quite a few. It has made the SPL very protectionist and means that outside of that league, it is almost impossible to run full time football and balance the books. I can only think of St Johnstone who manage it in any meaningful way and that is in part down to them having other income from the facilities around their ground As for the community football thing - in the face of what a typical first division club needs in terms of funding, its a joke. Taking my club, Morton, losses last year were around £335,000 all of which is funded from Douglas Rae's Group, Golden Casket. If he was not there, could Greenock come up with a thousand people willing to cough up £335 per annum ongoing over and above their normal football costs? I have my doubts. And then there's the cost of upgrading Cappielow if we are ever to have SPL ambitions - £2-3m minimum? We are just lucky to have found ourselves an honest millionaire who is also a Morton man through and through. There not much room here for some of the smug comments that have been made. Nearly every club in lower league Scotland and especially the first division should look at Livi and think "there but for the grace of god!"

Livi are in part a victim of their own success in that they had to have an SPL compliant 10,000 all seater stadium which is far, far too big for them. They might well have had a better chance in a stadium that better matches their client base and realistic aspirations. To a certain extent the problem applies to Clyde and Airdrie also - whats the point of occupying and paying for a ground which is far bigger than they need. The fact that Livi have been run by more than their fair share of rogues does not help. If they do go into administration next week as is widely rumoured, I think the league will come down hard on them and a 10 point deduction will be the least of their troubles - I have heard that it is proposed to relegate them straight to the third division should they survive until the end of this season.

The reality is that the Inland Revenue are a creditor in virtually every company failure and unlike most other creditors they know exactly what the score is. They put more companies into liquidation than anyone else in the UK and sentiment will not come into it. If Livi go for an administration order, that will be the third time in 10? years. That is really taking the corporate p1ss and I suspect they would have a tough time convincing the court (who say yes or no to admin applications) that an admin order is appropriate. If its not then its liquidation and curtains for the club. The league would also take a tough stance and there's a good chance that if they go into admin again that they will be relegated straight to the third division. At the very least there will be the usual 10 point deduction