RAM1966

The EFL were trying to bring the points deduction sanctions to an agreed conclusion with Morris long before we went into administration. A 9 to 12 point deduction was always the ballpark sanction being mooted for the P&S violations. It's based on being in breach in 3 of the 4 rolling three year windows in the period in question.
Going into administration achieved nothing other than to get us an additional automatic 12 point deduction, followed by the 9+3 suspended points deduction we were always going to get.
If did absolutely nothing to improve the club's  negotiating position with the EFL. This claim is just a restatement of Mel Morris's propaganda to justify putting us into Administration. There's no evidence for it whatsoever.
 

And if Mel would have kept funding the club for a bit longer, the chances of us being a Championship club next season would have improved and kept the clubs value higher - so has he cut his nose off to spite his face ?

Perhaps the original bid was £3? It's been more than enough to buy Derby before!

Is that you in training already Mackworth. Who you taking on first Gibson or Mel.

I agree that Morris has acted recklessly, no question. You cannot ignore COVID of course which no reasonable person could have anticipated. Even so, you might expect someone to have something set aside for contingencies not just burn though £200 million and have nothing left.
But if you can't honour your debts (and many people for whatever reason do get into that situation) what can you do? All I have said is that administration was then the only option, if the alternatives are fraudulent trading or liquidation. Not much of a choice but that is where we were at.  It's not running away quite the contrary .. it's facing up to the facts, grim though they are.  
 

couldnt the fans crowdfund the £20m to OWN the stadium, then rent it the club for free but with tied in benefits, structured around season tickets and discounted hospitality /events
 
If fans want to TRULY be in control then owning the biggest asset is better than owning the actual club in some ways
 

The Covid question is a legitimate one. How much has it affected the course of the club? Impossible for us to say. But we can see how other clubs are affected. If we find that most clubs can manage to circumnavigate the waves of Covid without sinking the club, can we surmise that Mel took us too far beyond the point of no return? All clubs had to manage through it one way or another. We're not the biggest club that had income restricted, plus we didn't lose the most money of all football teams - although I accept as a proportion of our funding, it had a major impact. But if other teams can manage to stay afloat I expect we should be able to. From what we're led to believe, Mel is one of the big money players, he's not a financial minnow.
Mel clearly was ready to pass the club on to the next person, as he was unwilling (unable? Impossible to say for sure) to keep paying. I think Covid offered him a great opportunity to stop paying what he'd committed himself to. In many ways perhaps he had little choice - who was going to come in and pay the full costs with the debts the club is carrying?
I think morally Mel had a duty to settle the outstanding bills at his own cost. It wouldn't have been easy, and it may have taken him time to get there. But in the meantime we should have started to cut our cloth accordingly, reduce the wages bill, reduce our costs and maximise our income. I'm sure it's possible to run the club without losing money every month, but it's highly implausible that any club can be competitive in the Championship while breaking even. With HRMC paid off and the club not bleeding cash a sale might have been possible. But when offered an opportunity to blame covid for administration, it likely has saved Mel tens of millions of pounds in total.

Why would you expect his personal wealth to be visible in any of his limited companies? The entire point of the limited company construct is to act as a firewall to protect the owner's personal wealth.

Mel boy give it a rest. He said he'd keep funding the club until he managed to find a buyer and then he stopped funding the club, so yet again just another false statement from the bloke. Now we can have a pointless discussion as to whether he'd reached a point where he was struggling to fund the losses as none of us know one way or the other. But putting the club into administration is by definition walking away from the situation. There is literally no other way you can put it. 
On his attempts to sell the club, he was still according to the Al-Jazeera documentary asking for 100 million all in, and 50 million for club minus the stadium. That is not the sale price of a man desperate to sell up, but rather the actions of a businessman looking to secure as much money as possible for a second division club. If he wanted out 2 years ago are you really telling me he couldn't have found a consortium who wanted to buy the club for a couple of quid? 
 

Pete scan this thread and see what the consensus is on here.
What any reasonable person would expect was that an owner of a business would not rack up heinous debts without having the means to repay those debts. That's just totally irresponsible.
And then when they realise they can't (or won't) honour the debts that they've racked up use administration to run away from the issues that they've created (zero accountability). That's just cowardly. 

What were the options again?

iram there is no need for insults. So you are questioning how Morris could run up a debt of £56million before going into administration. A fair question, like you say he did indicate he would carry on providing support until a new owner was found. But no new owner was found, so he had to bite the bullet.  What would you have done? Carry on trading at a loss? That may not even be legal.  

I am sorry if you considered my comments personally insulting. It is impossible to put myself in Morris’s shoes, as I have no idea of his net worth at the time he a) ran up the debt, and b) put the club into Administration. My guess though is he remains pretty wealthy, and he chose to walk rather than put more money in.
If I was owner of the Club, I would not have racked up the debt unless I was prepared to personally repay it. As @Revsaid yesterday, any Club owner should be under a moral obligation to transfer the Club to a subsequent owner in no worse condition than it was acquired.

Oh Kevin, you are such a tease dragging me back in.
The principal point I was making was duck off Morris wanting £20m. He has had his go, he tried his best, he had some bad luck, but at the end of the day through his total mismanagement and largesse he has left the Club with the very real prospect of Tier 8 football. To want to still take some money from the administration process (as Nixon suggests) in my view is completely out of order. Suck it up Mel. I am pretty sure you remain the wealthiest individual viewing this forum.
To keep the Club going, i.e. to avoid liquidation, the Administrators have to get a deal that keeps HMRC happy (perhaps 50%), sees MSD and football creditors fully repaid, covers 25% of unsecured creditor claims, and also keeps the EFL happy in respect of business planning for the next 2 years under profit and sustainability rules. Oh, and to cover Quantuma’s admin. fees. That I imagine requires a new owner to stump up something in the order of £50m*, with a commitment to cover future running costs, but still having to lease a stadium!   Morris is apparently asking for £20m to make the stadium part of the deal. *l haven’t gone back to the creditors list in truth to do do the maths so £50m is a broad guess on my part.
Morris is in my view still risking the Club’s very future. He would appear (based on Nixon’s comments) to be making a potential owner pay an extra £20m to buy the Club and to obtain the stadium freehold, as frankly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to pay £50m at the moment for a football squad and two leasehold interests (stadium and training ground), when the club most likely will be in League 1 next season. Having the freehold to the stadium makes the deal more attractive obviously, but the extra £20m might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
At the moment there does appear some hope that someone might just pay what is required, but I would imagine negotiations are now at a crucial point. The Administrators are under pressure to confirm a preferred bidder who can keep everybody happy, and therefore to avoid a potential fire sale of player assets this month.  There must be an element of brinksmanship from Morris here. He is already seen by many as a Bamford, god knows how he will be seen if he then is seen to stymie any takeover deal to get his hands on £20m - particularly for something that was a Club asset when he bought the Club.
(Just as a by the way, I think If the Club does go into liquidation, because no one might want to pay the figures indicated above, then MSD will then enforce its third party security by appointing a receiver under the fixed charge given by Gellaw, and take possession of the Stadium. How much it will be worth at that point is beyond me, as I cant think the Club (by which I mean any future owner of Derby Newco) will need use of a 33k seater for a good few years. Obviously any sale of the stadium will only go to repay MSD’s debt, not any of the Club’s other creditors. Any surplus I would think would go back to Gellaw under modern day equity of redemption practice.)
 
 
 

Well then, it seems pretty clear that Mel, channelling his inner Greg Wallace, did indeed eat my hamster, served up on a buttery biscuit base.  I agree with most posters that he made loads of mistakes but I still stand by my original point that administration wouldn’t have happened without the EFL retrospectively changing the rules, and then actively trying everything from delaying tactics, constant appeals and spin to get us where we are.  That and Covid.  I am willing to bet the loses posted by Bristol City are the tip of the iceberg and I am expecting to spend the rest of the season watching the EFL busily extending a helping hand to 23 overspending clubs while casually keeping their foot on the throat of ours.  David mentioned Mel writing a book, which would be interesting, but I think a lot of the actions of the EFL are in the public domain already and I’d hope one of the journos who cover the club had a bash at it. 

The bare minimum we should expect from any owner is they leave the club in no worse a position than they inherited.
If an owner can't commit to that, they shouldn't take control.
It would take the world's largest top hat, and a whole Warren of Rabbits, for that to be the case now.

Do you actually believe the guff you sometimes write? He (Morris) ran up £56m of debt before the Club went into administration; a lot of the creditors (particularly the unsecured ones) presumably relying on his repeated assurances that he would continue being a benefactor until a new owner was found. Your assertion that going into admin. actually protected the creditors is as fatuous as it is insensitive.

We will stay up. 110%

Won't you be changing that to "We'll poo at the end"?  
 
EDIT:
Damn censorship!  "Poo" does not rhyme with "fight".  Down with this sort of thing!   

I've not been to an away game all season, but really want to go to this one. 
Buy a ticket, don't buy any food or drink, sing about Gibson, at the end of the game, have a poo and don't flush, dirty protest 

I suppose buy a ticket but not buy anything in the concourse.

I've said the same myself numerous times about the Administrators role is to get the best deal for the creditors and not the club.  However they should not be stating an update imminently about naming the preferred bidder if they were not even close, which appears they are not.  The administrators have done this only to try and deflect any flack they would attract when CK walked away. 
It now makes me very suspicious of anything they say including their original comments about being very confident that the club would be saved, I think they could be stringing us all along now until the end of Jan when the TW closes, in that time they will have a closing down sale, finally closing the doors to PPS at some point in Feb.   I hope I'm wrong, but, as each week passes I think this is more and more the likely outcome!
 
 

Do you mean this independent disciplinary panel?
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/Derby-county-efl-appeal-fine-5605588
https://www.efl.com/news/2021/june/-Derby-county/
The EFL did not ignore the findings. In fact they (reluctantly) accepted them and decided not to appeal against the £100k fine.
It was the independent panel itself that
"found the policy adopted for the amortisation of player registrations and the description in the notes to the Annual Accounts did not comply with Profit & Sustainability (P&S) rules"
and in consequence, ordered Derby
"to submit revised and restated accounts for the years ended 30 June 2016, 30 June 2017 and 30 June 2018" using a "compliant form of amortisation in accordance with accounting standard FRS102 and the requirement of the P&S Rules".
From what I remember, Mel assured us that the revised accounts would still be within FFP. It was only in the final interview with Radio Derby that he finally admitted that this wasn't the case.
Apologies in advance if you're referring to a different part of the process though...
 
 

During my time as a Senior Union Official, I've met several multi millionaires, One more than once(Sir John Rose ex CEO of Rolls Royce)and the common denominator is...they see life WAY WAY different to a person on the shop floor, If I only had £10k and lost £9,500 on a secondhand car as it was broken i'd be mortified , Or if had 100s of millions of £s and lost £100m what's all the fuss, I'm still filthy rich.
MM doesn't walk in our shoes...he may have done once, The circle he runs in is wealth, He kidded those who believed him, People fooled him he employed, Money becomes an issue when you see walking at the end of the tunnel and the tap is still running and pissing money out...Lansdowne at Bristol City a good example.
MM played HIS! game, Turned the tap off, He loved the limelight as pictures of him at away games buying beers for some, He didn't like to be criticised...hence the Breakfast Club a few years back, The fallout with several Managers, Walking into the dressing room at HT, The shananingans over Pearsons/Clements sackings shows what kind of person MM is/was.
MM also gave a lot of his wealth away, Hospital, Charities, Supporters, Gifts left right and centre, But in a "selfish" way knowing he either put it through as tax relief or knew his other monies would re coup those gifts.
He'll get no plaudits or anger from myself, It's the person on the shopfloor who gets my sympathy.