- July 25th, 2010, 9:48 am
#312830
No. Well they almost did. Here's the simple breakdown:
In Jan, Portsmouth was going to fold. An asian guy Chainrai came in and loaned the club 20Mil to keep afloat. The company went into administration(bankruptcy) and inserted a greek guy Adrianskdjdsbkbokis as the administrator(acting superior officer) to get the club out of debt. He used a backdoor settlement policy(called a CVA) to create an agreement to pay only 20% of debts.
In order to pass this CVA, 75% of creditors needed to accept the settlement in order for it to go through. The HMRC(effectively known as the TaxMan) was open about their refusal to vote for the agreement. They were owed somewhere between 20-30% of the debts, so with their vote Portsmouth could be doomed. When AA(the greek guy) tallied up the debts, he may have inflated the debts of the other creditors in order to balance out the money owed to the Taxman.
So the CVA was passed, but there's now an appeal. On top of all this, Portsmouth has been under a transfer embargo that includes free transfers and out of contract(Portsmouth players who have an expired contract) players. We scrapped the reserve team because we dont have enough players to field one.
So now we have roughly 10 "senior players." The rest of the squad are youth kids from the academy. Chainrai is trying to buy the club(hell make a ton of money off his investment), AA is employed by him already, and Peter Storrie(the CEO during the debt pile up) is being retained as an "advisor."