OI, Bertrand has been at several games this and last season. If he isn't aware of the significant risk we could be in L2 then he probably on some mind altering substance. Am sure they are well aware of that possibility and wouldn't still be here if it was a problem for them

Are they happy in starting from League 2 next season? We're going to be in a serious relegation battle by the New Year and every other club will see us coming in January if we try to buy ourselves out of relegation.

Trigs, it's possible he isn't real / doesn't actually exist. Let's see if he turns up at any of the meetings or at Plough Lane at some point

I think the Mir video last night was AI

There was a condition on half of the £16 million - can't remember specifically what but it was something to do with football infrastructure? I'd say use the rest to pay off the bonds completely (or at least nearly completely) and get that noose off our neck so at the very least we are debt free

Absolutely correct Russ, if the 16 million turns up we have successfully kicked the can quite a long way down the road. Whether we ever see the other 71 million can be questioned but we seem to have proof of funds for the first tranche.

And Happy Birthday of course also to Danny Cowley and Yado Mambo

And please, don't google six seven

Happy Birthday Lawrie Sanchez - he hits the big Six-Seven today [Link]

As long as the safeguards are robust we have to go for it. I don’t really see where Omar Mir gets the money from, he’s not a significant shareholder of WWT. But if £16m lands in our account to kick things off then we have paid off the bonds and had significant investment in the football side before we even have to start worrying about anything else.

Not being in anyway financially astute, on first glance this looks to good to be true, but I'm sure others will drill into the detail to see if there are any pitfalls. If it is what it seems to be it is exciting, especially expanding the stadium (I voted two ticks years ago for the promise of a 20,000 ground). Hopefully including a large warm, dry indoor lounge for supporters (= customer friendly and increased revenue) - under an enlarged south stand perhaps.

Nick i got the vibe that he isn't a good public speaker. I think he said the right things without being punchy and charismatic in the way he said them.

One thing, of course, is that his involvement with the King’s trust does suggest that he doesn’t have any skeletons in the cabinet- I would assume that given the close involvement with the monarchy anyone with an ongoing senior role in that would have had to go through a lot of vetting by the security services.

I presume that the “King’s Trust” of which Dr Mir is a major benefactor, is “the charity formerly known as the Prince’s Trust”?

Of the acquiring team last night the only one who seemed pretty unimpressive was Bertrand, though he may just not be a good public speaker. That said, they seem a pretty clued-up investor group and I suspect that if he doesn’t perform for them he will be eased out.

I agree with the pretty much all that is said below. We were always going to transition away from the fan-owned/controlled model in some way and this seems a good way to do that. One thing that I wanted to correct from a post of mine last night is that I had got a bit over-excited and said that them paying £87m for 90% of the economics of the club valued the club at £100m. As the money is going into the club, rather than being paid to existing owners to buy the shares, that isn’t really a right calculation - I don’t know what the actual implied value of the club is (perhaps someone who knows more about corporate finance than me can work it out) but in any case, for all that, the deal is way better than we could have expected given our current situation, so a lot of credit is due to the DTB and their advisors for getting us here. If someone had said back in 2002, when we had literally nothing, that one day someone who had made their money in AI would invest £87m into the club, while still leaving us with a fully-owned ground on Plough Lane it would have been beyond the realms of imagination (and not just because AI didn’t even exist then!!).

Get thumped by poor teams and bare to survive or play to score goals and thump teams,im excited,please let this go through, looking forward to some sexy entertainment on the pitch;-)

We'll probably end up with John Terry as manager in 6 months time. After all he's mates with Bertrand and is always bitching about getting overlooked at Chelsea.

Morning all. I think we must give a lot of credit to the board for the work to bring us to this point. A much better proposition than I was expecting. I look forward to reading the detail. Was impressed by Hugh, albeit I suspect his day to day involvement will be limited.

Nick / you are right - but a presentation taking out the flowery bits would just them saying we are going to invest lots of money and we want to make more money when we leave - they touched on the community stuff - and again you are right - they were talking about expanding community outreach to more of London and Internationally

I agree with everything Hash says at 7.04 - only one thing to add: 12. Omar Mir to henceforth be known and referred to as “Freddie” (from last night…).

Also, Pricey did a LOT of the heavy lifting last night, kudos to him.

I know. It’s still a donation though. My biggest worry in this is Bertrand. I know we’re not all good at public speaking, but he spoke in so many vagaries. If he’s in charge of all football ops thats a bit scary. I hope the investor has an easy way to get rid of him if we end up being one of his mates bitch clubs

TM - they're not donating £200k unless the vote passes. It's part of the deal.

* ... if the vote doesn't pass.