"The ICT Thread - The Championship Years"

[Mark Connolly]

6 hours ago, GNU_Linux said:

That's one way to celebrate yer 30th anniversary

TBF another club celebrated their 140th by going bust

[SandyCromarty]

1 hour ago, CountyFan said:

Presumably the ones Caley and their fans were unable to sufficiently intimidate. 

My reason for wanting to know which councillors voted against is only to see which of those represent Inverness wards and how many represent country areas.

[SandyCromarty]

53 minutes ago, Supercaleyman94 said:

Worry about your own club you're a Morton fan presumably from Greenock why do you care so much about Inverness? We don't want your pennies worth. We've tried our best to back the club anyway we can. It's not our fault that the board & now the Highland Council have shafted us big time.

I wouldn't wish this uncertainty on any club or their fans even if a couple of fans on P&B pissed me off so much that I'm still raging about it years later.

Nobody replies to VT, he's bad news, best stick him on ignore as most do.

[parsforlife]

I find in interesting a sale is agreed on condition of planning, does perhaps indicate how confident the buyer is that planning would be granted?
 

They presumably have a lot more knowledge about to use to prove the site would be suitable?  Yet they are happy to pay a premium so they can delicate the process to a football club? 

[McGuigan1978]

Is there anyone involved in Scottish football who has a worse track record than Scott Gardiner? 

Almost everyone who followed Dundee and Hearts felt he was ill suited to running a football team, and yet somehow he managed to get another post at Inverness. 

I was going to say he was the CEO equivalent of Gary Locke, but at least Locke had that decent spell at Cowdenbeath. 

Edited March 14 by McGuigan1978

[Central Belt Caley]

16 minutes ago, McGuigan1978 said:

Is there anyone involved in Scottish football who has a worse track record than Scott Gardiner? 

Almost everyone who followed Dundee and Hearts felt he was ill suited to running a football team, and yet somehow he managed to get another post at Inverness. 

I was going to say he was the CEO equivalent of Gary Locke, but at least Locke had that decent spell at Cowdenbeath. 

He’s an idiot, his strengths lie in writing overly wordy statements

His weaknesses are ordering seats and running a football club 

[Central Belt Caley]

Mentioned earlier in the thread but sledging for the kids is a legitimate reason to oppose the battery farm ffs 

[Alert Mongoose]

13 hours ago, SandyCromarty said:

Interesting to know which councillors voted against.

 

[RiG]

8 hours ago, Central Belt Caley said:

Mentioned earlier in the thread but sledging for the kids is a legitimate reason to oppose the battery farm ffs 

Looking forward to the next lot of houses at Milton of Leys and Culduthel being rejected because they are on a hill that some weans like to scoot down on a sheet of red plastic when it's snowy 3 days a year.

[vikingTON]

12 hours ago, SandyCromarty said:

Nobody replies to VT, he's bad news, best stick him on ignore as most do.

Ignoring 'bad news' and inconvenient facts seems to be working out well for you. 

[Dunning1874]

11 hours ago, ICTChris said:

The club is fucked tbh. There’s nothing to be done. If we go into administration maybe something can be salvaged but it’s been decades of mismanagement. We were in a roughly similar position in 2002 but the effective takeover by Tullochs/David Sutherland allowed us to get past it. Something similar would need to happen now but there’s no Tullochs right now.

Genuine questions, how many players are under contract for next season and how much debt is the club in? If the club just slash the playing budget - and indeed the non-playing budget meaning you can say goodbye to a charlatan like Gardiner - so the losses stop piling up this obviously leaves you with the outstanding debt to directors who've been maintaining the losses with loans every season.

That's likely debt you're not going to raise the sums to clear if you end up in League One, but that also changes the whole nature of the conversation about how to be a sustainable club. Rather than your directors being able to continually point fingers elsewhere to deflect from their own role, having seen amazing get rich quick schemes like the concert company and (pending an appeal) now the battery storage blow up in their face, at that point that the debt is the sole issue they have no one else to blame.

If you actually get to a place of breaking even year on year then the debt is the sole threat to the club's continued existence, and rather than playing the victim because of the intransigence of the council or whoever else, current and former directors then have the scrutiny fully turned on them. Are they willing to kill the club by calling in the debt to them personally, a debt that only exists because of their inability to budget properly while they were supposed to be custodians of the club, even with such massive financial windfalls as a Scottish Cup final? The likes of Ross Morrison could hardly play the victim in that scenario if they didn't simply write the debt off.

[Zen Archer (Raconteur)]

11 hours ago, McGuigan1978 said:

Is there anyone involved in Scottish football who has a worse track record than Scott Gardiner? 

Almost everyone who followed Dundee and Hearts felt he was ill suited to running a football team, and yet somehow he managed to get another post at Inverness. 

I was going to say he was the CEO equivalent of Gary Locke, but at least Locke had that decent spell at Cowdenbeath. 

The Uncle Albert of Scottish football.

[ICTChris]

I don’t think we have debt to anyone other than the directors or those behind the directors. I’m sure that in a previous financial statement we said we don’t Have any bank debt or owe money to HMRC or the usual things that cause clubs to go under.

One thing that makes our position hard to work out is that it isn’t entirely clear who owns the club. David Sutherland and Tullochs have stepped back since the relegation in 2017, up until that point it was clear that they were controlling the club - the chairmen were all linked to them and you’d get the occasional statement from Sutherland. Since then the revolving door in the boardroom doesn’t appear to have anyone controlling it, although from what anyone can tell David Sutherland still has the majority control. After relegation is looked like the Savage-McGilvary faction were coming back to prominence with Orion employees appointed as manager (Robertson) and director of football (Danny MacDonald) but that didn’t seem to come to anything.

Sutherland is also involved in the battery farm deal, I believe he owns the land. Essentially, I think if these guys say they can’t cover losses any more we will go into admin as we can’t say we will go on as a going concern and I’m not sure who would come in. The Supporters Trust should use this stuff as a way to increase membership but from what I can see it isn’t really set up as meaningful vehicle to try and run the club, although the people involved are good and it’s a positive organisation.

Lawrie on CTO posted this breakdown of major shareholders (over 50,000 shares).

	No. shares
Inverness Caledonian Thistle Trust Limited	729500
Caledonian Football Club	600000
Graham Rae	382400		Former Chairman (Muirfield Mills)
Inverness Thistle Football Club	300000
Orion Engineering Services Limited	275189		(Alan Savage - Former Director)
Dugald McGilvray	275167		Former Chairman
Iain McGilvray	191816
Orion Group UK Limited	191317		(Alan Savage - Former Director)
David Cameron	175000		Director
Roderick Ross	170000		Club President
Richard Hillier	164900		(Muirfield Mills)
Russell Cameron	102150		(Muirfield Mills)
Dornoch Developments Ltd	100000		(Directors include Caroline Clayton, George Fraser, David Sutherland)
Paul MacInnes	89150		(Muirfield Mills)
Alan McPhee	77150		Former Director (Muirfield Mills)
Emeric Innes	57750		(Muirfield Mills)
George Fraser	51600		Former Director
David Sutherland	50250		Former Director
Gordon Allan Munro	50000		Director
Caroline Clayton	50000
Anne Sutherland	50000
Catriona Ramsay	50000

 

Muirfield Mills are the consortium from the US who invested in us about ten years ago.

The Inverness Caledonian Thistle Trust Ltd is the vehicle created by David Sutherland to manage the club during his time in charge in the early 2000s.  I'm not sure who is involved in that organisation - from memory David Stewart was involved, former MP and MSP for the area.  ETA - David Stewart is still a director, as are a few other local people - https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC211723/officers

The Caledonian Football Club and Inverness Thistle Football Club shares are refelctive of the membership of each club at the time of the merger.  When the Supporters Trust was set up there was some talk of these shares going to the supporters trust but obviously that never happened.  EDITED TO ADD - Charles Bannerman confirmed on CTO that these shares are not full voting shares and that they were passed to the Supporters Trust a few years ago.

 

Edited March 15 by ICTChris

[ICTChris]

No official statement from the club, which makes me think there are a few things playing out behind the scenes - whether that's administration, CEO/chairman leaving, the board resigning or something like that.

Our CEO has said we will be making ethics complaints against councillor Paul Oldham, I'm sure that will get it all sorted out!

[Ludo*1]

See the comparison with Gary Locke is unfair to Locke. Locke is just incompetent, whereas Gardiner is a poisonous, odious snake that creates a very toxic culture at the clubs he goes to in addition to his clear incompetence.

[101]

Obviously there are tax advantages for ICT for being in the Freeport area but I do wonder if the guys who own the lad decide the battery farm isn't going to work on a small scale but that the land is now massively more valuable than it was before and could just duck out of running a football club and cashing a Hugh cheque for a massive plot in a low tax area?

Not great situation regardless of the motive.

[Buzz Killington]

On 14/03/2024 at 11:56, Buzz Killington said:

Huge moment for fans of football club seething statements.

Quote

Chairman Ross Morrison made the following statement to give fans an update on the week’s events. “The club notes with bewilderment and disappointment, yesterday’s refusal of the ICT Battery Farm planning application.”

“Without going into everything that happened, it was an especially mystifying decision given that no new evidence was provided which was worthy of overturning the previous progressive and lawful vote in February to grant us planning. We can however confirm that we are appealing the decision to the Scottish Govt.”

“While this bizarre decision to overturn our previous successful planning application was a set-back to our robust and long term business plan, we will consolidate and pull together as a Board and a club as we have done many times in our history both on and on the field.” “We want to thank the hundreds of Caley Thistle fans and the businesses and organisations who have been entirely supportive in our quest to improve the club’s financial model and the city’s energy security." “

On behalf of the Board and as we move into our historic thirtieth year and a crucial end of season period, we need to show that by sticking together and sticking to our values, by backing Duncan and the team, nothing can stop us getting to where we want to be this season and in our next 30 years.”

 

 

Edited March 15 by Buzz Killington
to include twitter link

[TheScarf]

[Pete the Jakey]

Lol.  Absolute shambles of a club in every regard.

[TheScarf]

25 minutes ago, Pete the Jakey said:

Lol.  Absolute shambles of a club in every regard.

That’s achieved more in the game than Ross County ever will. Despite having a multi millionaire backer who’s written off more millions of pound of losses than anyone could ever imagine.