Consortium in talks to salvage Bury while fans wait in wings with plan B
A consortium is negotiating with the Bury owner, Steve Dale, to buy the remains of the club expelled from the EFL in August, as the difficult process of trying to revive professional football in the town continues.
Any deal by the consortium, whose members are understood to be Bury supporters, in effect involves taking over the club’s debts, which include approximately £1m owed to former players and other football creditors, and £2.75m owed to unsecured creditors under a company voluntary arrangement.
The businessmen would also be expected to come to an arrangement with Capital Bridging Finance Solutions, holder of a £3.8m mortgage on Gigg Lane which presents the main barrier to a new club playing at Bury’s 134year-old ground.
At a fractious meeting of supporters at Bury town hall on Thursday the supporters’ trust, Forever Bury, introduced Robert Benwell, 35, as the proponent of a plan B if the consortium fails and the club goes into liquidation, or Capital repossesses the ground, which it has so far declined to do despite having its interest unpaid.
Benwell told the meeting of around 400 people he could not reveal precise financial details of this plan and did not have a contract with Capital but had £600,000 of his own money for a part-payment of the mortgage and to invest in a new club. He said the interest to Capital on the rest of the mortgage would be paid by charging supporters a £4 premium on tickets. Benwell said he planned to put the ground into ownership of a trust in the name of his children, to protect it from his other businesses.
Questioned by a supporter about the number of dissolved companies of which he has been a director, Benwell said none had gone into liquidation and that dissolving companies can be an efficient way of closing them down.
Interviewed by the media, Benwell cited two companies as the main businesses from which he has made money: Optimal Hosting and R5. Optimal Hosting was struck off the company register and dissolved in August 2016. Its last accounts, for the year to 31 July 2014, showed it had net assets of £57,715.
R5 stopped trading in 2009; seven years later, according to a court document, Benwell applied to have it restored with a new name, RBS Global Trading, sohe could access the money still in its bank account. Benwell said he had sold the company’s assets and closed it down, which meant its bank account had been frozen for years.
“I forgot about it until we were moving house and I was going through the old paperwork and noticed the money was still in the account,” he said.
Chris Murray, the chair of the Bury supporters’ group who have carried out preparatory work for a Bury AFC phoenix club and have applied for admission to the North West Counties League next season, told the meeting this was plan C, ready to go if the other efforts did not succeed.