Will he or won’t he ?

I guess we are going to find out this week whether Tahnoon Nimer has any money and if so -is he prepared to put it in to pay the monthly wages.

It’s a pretty binary situation, either he doesn’t which tells you all you need to know about him or if he does then I guess we have an owner ( of sorts)

If he doesn’t , then unless someone finds c £500k down the back of the EFL or Sky sofa, administration would seem to be the most likely option.

Would that get us a better owner ? – who knows but the splitting of The Valley from the football club remains the biggest problem. I think we should lobby the council for a Compulsory Purchase Order on The Valley. Both Millwall and West Ham play on land owned by public authorities.

Duchatelet is totally responsible for CAFC mess

The news broke yesterday that the takeover of Charlton is under investigation by the EFL.  The EFL is a completely incompetent, ineffective and badly managed organisation.

When anyone agrees to buy an EFL football club, common sense tells you that they should be required to put a significant amount of funding into escrow to demonstrate source of funds and the ability to fund at least a season if not two. In Charlton’s case, a requirement to lodge £5m in escrow would have thwarted this takeover by scammers.

The real villain here though, yet again, is Roland Duchatelet. His insistence on a ridiculous valuation of the property assets has put off all sensible buyers so that the only deal that he could secure is to give the loss making football side of the business away for free which enabled him to walk away from the annual losses whilst retaining The Valley and Sparrows Lane. He did no due diligence on the buyers, a rudimentary search of the internet for Matt Southall would have told you all you need to know.

I have no idea how we get out of this mess, but I’m sure Roland is rubbing his hands with glee that the football club is likely to go into administration and may well receive a points deduction too.

Here’s an idea, both West Ham and Millwall who are our nearest neighbours have Stadia that are positioned on local authority/ publicly owned land.  We are going to have this problem continually at CAFC until we get public ownership of the land at The Valley. I cannot claim any expertise in this area but councils can use Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs)  ”to acquire historic buildings in order to preserve them from neglect”

As I understand it The Valley is designated an Asset of Community Value and the legislation states that ” an ACV-registered building can be compulsorily purchased by the local authority or council if the asset is under threat of long-term loss to the community”. That absolutely describes the situation we currently face.

This is the 2nd time in my lifetime that the existence of the football club has been under threat because of the separation of The Valley from the football club and it needs to stop now.