Dibbles old paperboy

please tell us all!

Why don't you man up and stop being an anonymous keyboard warrior and take your asset-stripping concerns at SMFC via REA / Life Church and Kibbleworks to the Serious Fraud office: http://www.sfo.gov.uk/fraud/what-is-fraud/corporate-fraud/asset-stripping.aspx?

It is slander to suggest that a St Mirren director would let his friends asset strip the club... something you said in your previous post. It is slander to say that SG and co trousered the Tesco money and I loved watching your climbdown on that one: to paraphrase somner when the threat on legal action was raised, 'well what i meant was that after the Tesco money had built Greenhill Road, demolished Love Street, repaid the bank and started the work at Ralston the directors got their loans to the club repaid'. It is slander to say the consortium would empty the club accounts of season ticket money and money from the SPL upon completing a sale of the club and keep that money for themselves as it is normal business practice to do this when you sell a company, or that they would have sold Mclean and / or McGowan and kept money for those sales for themselves rather than it staying in the club accounts if they accepted a lower offer than what they were looking for / expecting from the sale of the club. You are obsessed with accusing directors who don't take any renumeration from the club of looking out for opportunities to line their own pockets when a ground is sold or the club is sold or when a CIC is set up they get their friends to asset-strip the club. You've been light on evidence for those accusations and I don't remember reading that you had gone to meet SG and REA in person to offer them a profound and personal apology.

some might say that you have just slandered Richard Atkinson again and also no doubt the Life Church and Kibbleworks again if they are the third parties you are referring to. It is OK for you to throw wild accusations around left right and centre but as soon as anyone calls you on it or throws any accusations your own way you go ape and yell slander and please censor the posts becaus eyou demand a personal apology. Do you still not see any irony in your posts and protestations?

I will happily to retract the stuff about Ayrshire and offer an apology on that if you want one - it was Sid who was beating the drum on that front. When someone accuses someone else of being a bigot, depending on the context the accusation might suggest someone was being racist or sectarian but this doesn't have to be the case. A bigot can be someone who is intolerant of any different opinion from their own or someone who is so convinced that they are right that they show no interest in compromise or giving people with a different opinion a fair hearing. Your last two posts have asked the moderators to intervene and censor or remove my posts. Point proven? According to you my masculinity depends on agreeing to re-read all your old posts and begin requoting them on the board to substantiate my claim that you have attacked Richard Atkinson personally. Several other people have pointed this out to you on this thread already but you don't seem to accept you have done this. You were the one who brought up RA's involvement with the Scottish Bible Society and said he had told bare faced lies and surely this went against what the Bible said about being honest with your followers... or words to that effect. First you bring up his involvement with a religious group, then you accuse him of lying and being a hypocrite, then later when i challenged you on this you say you don't know what he believes and any religious beliefs he has are not important to you or your view of him and you've been careful not to suggest he has lied or leaked stories to the press. If Richard Atkinson's religious views are not important to you and if you don't know anything about those why did you introduce his directorship at Scottish Bible Society into the debate here and accuse him of going against the Bible by telling bare faced lies? My recollection of the last public meeting was that when Tony Fitzpatrick began dropping hints that Massone may be one of the rival / other bidders that Richard Atkinson interrupted him and said to the meeting that some of the names mentioned in the press had not bid for the club and there were interested parties whose names hadn't been mentioned in the press or guessed at from the floor on the night of the meeting. His position on Rangers at the time of that meeting was he thought the tide had turned and no one would vote for them to re-enter the SPL as a newco and taking the SFA to court had blown away any support they previously had in any SPL clubs and that it was unknown territory as to what would happen with TV deals and sponsorship money with Rangers' involvement... he seemed to think the most likely scenario was that some value would be lost from TV and sponsorship but if there wasn't a massive change then St Mirren would cope... he could also see a doomsday scenario if Sky pulled out completely but didn't know how likely that was and also thought that more optimistically there was a small chance St Mirren might benefit financially... if standing up at the vote meant more St Mirren fans attended games in support of the stance and if some disgruntled bears came along to our games as neutrals or we got a bigger slice of a smaller TV deal. I can't remember seeing many quotes from Richard Atkinson saying he was in favour of keeping Rangers in the SPL or SFL1 so that St Mirren would avoid a financial Armageddon... if anyone made those type of statements it was our chairman rather than our commercial director. Somner feel free to suggest where my posts pointing out your own narrow-minded bigoted posts were indictaing you were anti-Catholic or anti-protestant (if that is what you think i meant by bigoted).

Somner I am enjoying the irony of having you advise me to think before I post and warning me about slander! This from the chap who was worried that the consortium might have trousered the money from any sale of McGowan or McLean in the last transfer window and hung on to that for themselves and used the money to make up for any loss they made on selling the club. It would take days if not weeks to detail all the places on this board where you have personally attacked Richard Atkinson, and besides not wanting to waste days or weeks of my life making that point and reminding you of all those occasions I would also have to suffer re-reading your posts into the bargain. No thanks. You claim innocently to not know about Richard Atkinson's religious beliefs yet you bring up the fact that one of his directorships is with the Scottish Bible Society. You complain about Life Church's involvement in the CIC and with developing the Void potentially. The post which I quoted did suggest that Richard Atkinson was the one leaking stories to the press. I see you are backing out of providing any evidence for this. The post you just made also suggested that he or the 10000Hours team tried to keep Rangers in the SPL or at the very worst in SFL1. Have you any evidence for this at all? I spoke with Richard Atkinson personally after the last public meeting as the CIC's view on how Rangers' situation was a big concern for me and was potentially a deal breaker. Nothing which he said in our conversation gave me the impression he was in favour of doing any special deals to keep Rangers in the SPL and he was all in favour of giving St Mirren fans the facts and figures on how much money we made from TV deals, sponsorships, gate receipts etc from being involved with the SPL and letting the fans vote after they had time to make sense of the figures.

In the past you have moaned about being personally attacked on the forum and said we shouldn't take personal swipes at people who have a different view from our own about the CIC or other takeover options. When it comes to posting about Richard Atkinson however, you seem to operate differently and continually drag up his religious beliefs as something to attack him with and the fact he is from Ayrshire and not originally a big football fan in general or St Mirren fan in particular. You also bang on about him buying or owning the club (if 10000Hours does complete the deal) with our money and question his motives. I'm prepared to take the guy at face value. I don't think he is a bare faced liar as you claim he is. I don't see anything sinister in Life Church using the facilities at St Mirren Park and it doesn't seem like a church using a suite at the ground is a huge leap from a couple deciding to have a wedding ceremony there or a post-funeral function there. He hasn't come in claiming St Mirren were his boyhood heroes but has said that since he got involved in the bid and on the board that he has got caught up in supporting the team and now considers himself a fan. He has also said that as far as the money side goes, he has already invested his own cash in the legal set up side of things with the CIC and was looking at putting in some of his own cash for the bid and / or taking out one of teh 1877 memberships and that he and anyone else on the boards of the CIC set up would not be taking any money out of the club. I don't think the guy is perfect or 10000Hours bid is perfect but I think both of them are honest and well-intentioned and Richard Atkinson has always seemed honest enough to say to public meetings hat he is sorry about x, y or z and could of done those better (if only he had followed Somner9's advice to the letter). Like other fans I think Atkinson's community angle is a decent way to grow the fan base by building links with community groups and getting them to use the stadium 7 days a week rather than once a fortnight can build a decent amount of goodwill for the club and in the long term bring more fans through the gates. But the bottom line will always be that crowds are most likely to increase when the team are playing well and getting results. Given Atkinson has now declared himself a St Mirren fan is there any chance you can tone down some of the bigoted personal attacks constantly being hurled in his direction? For better or for worse he has taken a different view from yourself about communication with the 10000Hours backers, when there is something new to say or a news update he passes it on pretty quickly (there have been 3 or 4 updates in the last month on the progress of the bid) and when there is no news he keeps quiet. I am probably not alone in preferring that level of communication and openness to someone posting day after day and week after week and month after month about whether any share of any potential profits from a bar in the void would make its way to the playing budget any time soon. Given the money SPL players are on there would have to be a helluva lot of profit from a matchday bar in the void to fund 1 players salary a year don't you think? PS in the past you said you also took legal advice with a view to suing a fellow forum member for slander. Do you have any hard evidence that Richard Atkinson or the non-existent 10000Hours online marketing team are personally behind scaremongering and deliberately inaccurate leaks to the press?

At least we have the ever reliable Sid to keep fans right when the club and 10000Hours can't be trusted. Sid you are a godsend.

Pure speculation on my part... why are the 10,000Hours team still there? answer: partly because there isn't a queue of local businessmen looking to invest in the club, partly because their bid is still live and partly because no one from the consortium wants to be club secretary or commercial director and someone needs to fill those positions?

The only members of the current board who still want to be involved now and going forward are... the guys from 10,000Hours? If you take them out the equation you are left with a group of guys who have done a good job over the long haul they have been there but they all want out. We either new to keep the new blood or try and have a steady hand over from the ones wanting out.

Having a BoD who mostly want to retire and move on isn't ideal however the ongoing saga of the sale of the club didn't seem to stop the team doing alright last year or starting OK this year. I don't think you could also say that the sale of the club is affecting the size of the squad budget either or how far the management team are backed by the BoD. It strikes me that things could be a lot worse than they are at present.

If the two other bids are only 'imaginary', 'rival' bids to generate interest in 10,000 Hours and 10,000 Hours don't have the readies then where does that leave SG and the consortium 3 years on from putting the club up for sale? I await St Sid's balanced and insightful considerations with interest.

Last time round (just before Rangers were told they were starting again in Division 3) was there not an agreement in principal to work towards a sale of the club within a year based on the level of support in July. I'd expect that with 43 lost DD mandates a smaller offer will have gone in this time.

So for someone who regularly goes on about not attacking fellow Saints fans on the forum (although you seem happy enough to take personal potshots at REA and also the 10000Hours team), you've actually gone as far as contacting your solicitor with a view to taking legal action against other forum users holding a different opinion from you?

If I remember correctly REA was going to invest (some of) his own money and has already spent a fair amount on legal fees etc from his own pocket.

some Rangers U19 players are on £2k a week plus a £35k bonus if they have been with them since U14s plus another bonus car worth up to £12k... just short of £150k a year.

It does go with the territory to some extent John. I raised somner's REA-bashing (which you seem happy to accept) in the context that he was moaning about being abused by Saints fans for standing up for truth and was only pointing out he is quite happy to descend to name calling and abuse when it suits him. My guess is 1 reason he has never accepted REA's offers to meet him is he might be too embarrassed about some of his online statements about REA to look him in the eye if they ever did meet.

OK I will help you. You moan about being abused by the pro-CIC brigade (often) and say you would never abuse a Saints fan but you have regularly abused REA for months on this board.

but REA is fair game for any level of abuse?

I'm sure in such a scenario that REA would indeed find it difficult to match the dignity you've demonstrated throughout the proceedings.

Adam was probably on something like £150k (including bonuses) last year with Rangers U19s. I expect that, quite rightly, we are offering him a lot less this year to be our No.2.

Sid's post is not a question for 10000Hours either.

The St Mirren board will still run SMFC as they do now, and appoint a manager who picks the team... the CIC will be the majority shareholders and represent at least 52% of the board. If fans feel strongly about an issue like newco Rangers it is the kind of issue where the CIC would meet and give fans the facts and pros and cons, the fans then vote and the CIC go back to the SMFC board meeting and say how the vote went and give direction to the board and when reps from the SMFC board meet the SPL committees will cast SMFC vote taking account of how the fans have voted.

Were you at the game caller? My guess is that given the meeting was always going to have a Q&A element to it that RA was expecting a question about where things were with SMISA and why there were stories of a fall out or SMISA pulling out their money etc. Perhaps he brought bits of paper with him, like the SMISA constitution so that when he answered the question he could quote stuff verbatim rather than answering off the top of his head and possibly misquoting folks? RA was at pains to point out that even though people laughed when he said that SMISA had the same clauses in their constitution which they were querying in the CIC's constitution that he wasn't out to humiliate SMISA and thought they were right to question or police the CIC bid and follow their own rules about spending their money... how this adds up RA attacking SMISA is beyond me!

... so is one of the other bidders going to pay with cash from their own persona;l account and pay all the extra tax by doing the deal this way rather than the 'tax efficient' way?