The Trust Board met last week to consider the replies by the consortium to comments made by the Trust and Club Boards regarding the Investment Offer. It was unanimously agreed by the Trust Board that all documentation be sent out to members for consideration. This was done yesterday.
The documentation consists of:
- The investment offer (by the consortium)
- A summary covering the salient points of the offer in plain English (by the consortium)
- The document containing comments and observations from the Trust and Club Boards and the replies from the consortium (by all parties)
Please note that the purpose of the dialogue between the Trust and the consortium up to this point has not been to negotiate the terms of the offer. Instead, we have tried to identify areas within the offer that we felt needed clarification or expansion and we hope this is reflected in the documents you now have before you. We have tried to make sure that members have as much information as possible, in clear and plain English, to help them reach a decision on whether the offer is acceptable and can proceed to the next stage. We expect that members will have their own questions and there will be plenty of opportunities to pose them to the relevant people, as outlined below.
The consortium has offered to pay some legal costs but these will be limited entirely to ensuring that what is in the summary document is a fair reflection of what is in the offer document itself.
If Trust members do accept the offer then they will be doing so only in principle. At this point the Trust Board would instruct the Club Board to carry out a due diligence exercise involving appropriately qualified legal and financial personnel. Only if the offer passed all due diligence tests to the satisfaction of all parties involved would it be formally accepted and a contract signed.
We have still to iron out a couple of procedural wrinkles before we can give you a definitive timetable for where we go from here but we don’t anticipate this taking too long. However, we are in the hands of others for this so cannot give you an exact timeframe right at this moment.
Assuming these wrinkles are ironed out satisfactorily, we anticipate the next phase to consist of:
- A period of consultation to allow Trust members to study the offer and ask any questions of both the Trust and the consortium (roughly 2 – 3 weeks)
- A public meeting to be held in Stirling, hosted by the consortium, at which Trust members and others will be able to question consortium members directly (at the end of that consultation period)
- A vote to accept the offer in principle or reject it (at a date yet to be determined but shortly after the public and Trust meetings)
We will issue details on how you can have your say once we have finalised the arrangements for this next phase.
We are also making arrangements for the vote to take place online and in person to ensure that as many members as possible can participate. To ensure the integrity of the voting process we will approach an independent body, likely Supporters Direct Scotland, to oversee the proceedings. We are currently producing a document outlining how the voting process will work and will issue that to members in advance of the vote once we have had it independently verified.
We hope that the efforts we have made in ensuring that you have full visibility of the offer documentation, the initial process the Board has undertaken to clarify the key points and the outline process we propose to allow members time to consider and question the participants demonstrates the commitment we made to you when we were appointed to be open and transparent in our dealings.
We look forward to a robust and open consultation period. You can access the documents mentioned above in our Document Library