Coventry City have been given permission to return playing at the Ricoh Arena
Obviously as a club who have faced a spell away from our home ground, we are more than aware of what It feels like to return home
Congratulations to Coventry and their supporters I am sure that first home game will be buzzing
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A stream of consciousness thread re Coventry City.
Pleased for any team to be back in its own city although, as said above, I wonder how many fans regard The Ricoh, rather than Highfield Road, as home?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/28894278
Highfield Road is now a housing estate, so with the best will in the world they'd are never going to be able to go "home". The Ricoh is the best they have got, so I am sure that a fair number will be happy just to see the team back in the city, indeed a number will not even be old enough to remember Highfield Road.
Best of luck to 'em.
For once, a High Court judge has got it absolutely right when dealing with a money grabbing entity attempting to use the letter of law to over turn what's right and proper.
Sisu, the hedge fund owners of Coventry City who moved the club to Northampton in the first place, have suffered a total defeat in a high court judgment damning their “mismanagement” and the "rent-strike” they conducted to deliberately imperil the owners of the Ricoh Arena.
Sisu had made allegations that Coventry City Council and its officers behaved improperly when the council refinanced a loan to the arena operating company, ACL, in January 2013, but Mr Justice Hickinbottom found that the council behaved properly throughout and that Sisu had withheld rent due at the Ricoh in order to financially “distress” ACL and hence buy a half share of the Stadium "at a knockdown price”.
Sisu had "seriously mismanaged” the club, the judge found, having lost around £40m since 2008 – when the hedge fund bought City, then in the Championship and playing at the Ricoh, as a “commercial investment”.
The rent, high at £100,000 a month, and all other arrangements, including that food and drink income went to ACL, were known to Sisu when they took over. They spent three years and huge money on a failed effort to win Premier League promotion before seeking to renegotiate the rent and arrangements, which ACL were prepared to do. However, while negotiating, Sisu deliberately withheld the rent to “distress” ACL.
The judge found: “Sisu had no strategy for maintaining a sustainable football club, except one which involved the purchase, at a knockdown price, of at least a 50% share in ACL and thus the Arena” and the purchase of ACL’s bank loan, also “at a knockdown price”. Trying to secure those aims at the lowest cost, Sisu stopped paying the rent, doing so for the last time in March 2012.
“Sisu distressed the financial position of ACL by refusing to pay ACL any rent or licence fee,” the judge found. “... It had the effect of reducing the value of the share in ACL that Sisu coveted. Sisu’s strategy of distressing ACL’s financial position ... was quite deliberate.”
The 49-page judgment is shot through with references to this “rent-strike”. It says: “CCFC [owned by Sisu], had fallen into a parlous state as a result of mismanagement, had unilaterally refused to pay the contractual rent it was legally obliged to pay to ACL.”
For those interested, the co-founder and CEO of Sisu is a lady called Joy Seppala who deserves to be named and shamed. This is what Bloomberg Business Week says about her;
Ms. Joy Victoria Seppala founded Sisu Capital Limited in 1998 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Seppala serves as a Manager at Huntsman Advanced Materials LLC. From 1995 to 1998, she served as Worldwide Head of the Special Situations Investment Group at Paribas Corporation in London. She joined Paribas Corporation as its Vice President in 1992. She worked for a number of years in the mergers and acquisitions departments of Kidder Peabody & Co. Incorporated, Drexel Burnham Lambert Incorporated, and Mitsubishi Trust & Banking Corporation. Ms. Seppala serves as a Panel Member of The Takeover Panel (U.K.). She serves as a Director at Sisu Capital Limited.
That CV is a great testimony to all the bullshit in the world of finance.
Sisu have, of course, appealed against the High Court judgement. Does Steve Waggott have a conscience?
Damn you waggot fukd it up again