At a supporters meeting at Fratton yesterday, which included members of Supporters Trust, Supporters Club and the Independent Supporters Association David Lampitt is ‘said’ to have said that as many as 5 parties were ‘interested’ in taking over at Fratton.
SOS Pompey were not present, apparently not invited with Bob Beech saying: ‘I don’t want to hear rehearsed answers to rehearsed questions.
‘They should have opened it up to all fans on a first-come, first-served basis.’
Ah well…
No names were mentioned although Lampitt did say that there is, and has been, a decent level of interest in the club with ‘more interest than there has been for a while’, with 4 or 5 interested now: ‘since last spring, shortly after the club went into administration, there has been a fairly consistent level of interest in the club from anywhere between one to three parties.
‘That hasn’t really changed. At the moment I think we have got four, maybe even five, interested parties.
‘At the moment, in terms of pure numbers, we probably have a bit more interest than there has been for a while.
‘That is understandable for the fact we have got through the administration period and have three or four months of reasonably healthy trading under our belts.
‘Any takeover speculation is quite damaging. You cannot say very much about it because often we don’t yet know whether a particular party is going to come up with the necessary to take the club forwards.’
Unlike Balram Chainrai, with comments he made recently, Lampitt does not think that this will be a quick ‘2-week’ process, which is not something I would have expected anyway: ‘Balou made some comments recently but the reality is we are still in a situation where nobody has proven funds.
‘My anticipation is it won’t be a particularly quick process.’
The fact that Keith Harris, the chairman of investment bankers Seymour Pierce, has been appointed to help sell the club cannot really be a bad thing can it as they, Seymour Pierce, have been involved in many takeovers.
Any takeover now MUST be the right one, so it MUST take the right length of time required, if this means months rather than weeks so be it! We cannot afford another balls up when it comes to a takeover and the next owners MUST be the right ones to offer a sustained period of stability to get us back up and running and then build the right way.
As I have said before, even if others might not agree, the way things are being run – in as much as who comes in and what is outlaid for them – the club is being run the right way really under Chainrai in many respects.
We have a massive wage bill that still needs to be addressed so we could not add too much more and more to this, nor could we justify adding further debts to what we have by spending too much on players.
Reducing this wage bill further will be the order of the day in the summer, removing more of the big earners and then ‘hopefully’ bringing in decent championship standard players on realistic money and contracts, is what I think we ‘should’ expect to see this summer.
‘If’ we are under new ownership and ‘if’ they are doing this then that would please me to be honest…
PLAY UP POMPEY!
