I am not filled with a great deal of enthusiasm for Bristol Rovers attempts to seek leave to appeal over the High Court ruling that Sainsbury’s were within their rights to withdraw from their agreement to buy the Memorial Stadium for £30 million. It appears that even if Rovers are granted leave to appeal, the best they can hope to obtain would be damages which are unlikely to be anywhere near the £30 needed to build the new UWE Stadium. I say all this without knowing the facts and we now move into the realms of what if.
The big if surrounds the very project itself. If Rovers do not secure the full £30 million, do they have a plan to somehow obtain the difference between what they might get from whatever figure they actually need? If the Rovers are still in the business of enabling development, presumably they will need to sell the Memorial Stadium for something other than a supermarket, housing perhaps. And that will require…planning permission all over again. That could take years.
If they do win win leave to appeal, the odds are that the case could drag on until Christmas and probably well beyond. This will cost money and lots of it. Is it conceivable that directors will fund the further legal action or will the club need to borrow even more? If they borrow, it won’t come cheap. It will surely be further venture capital.
But what if they fail? That will surely be that for the UWE Stadium, and then what? A club with a small mountain of debt, with no ability to pay it off and according to the chairman Nick Higgs certain to lose even more money? The implication from Mr Higgs is that Rovers can never so much as break even for as long as they are at the Memorial Stadium, regardless of the possibility of redevelopment, which would require…oh no…further planning permission.
Rovers must think they have a good chance of winning leave to appeal, unless this is a final, desperate gambit they believe they have no alternative but to play. But surely no business would gamble absolutely everything on a court case which they knew would surely break it if they lost? There would be a Plan B on which to fall back. Wouldn’t there?
From a distance, it all seems a bit bleak to me. Obviously, the club can’t give constant updates about what is or isn’t going on, so we are stuck with the guessing game; will it, won’t it happen.
I am not a betting man so I won’t be putting the house on one result or another, but my gut feeling is that Rovers will end up with a wedge from Sainsbury’s which will help paying off or reducing the club’s debts, but nowhere near enough to build the UWE. Let’s hope my guesswork is a million miles out.
They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t regarding the decision to seek leave to appeal.
Who knows, it may all end in an out of court settlement and the dream will be over? And for many Gasheads, particularly those of us of a certain age, it may be a broken dream too many.
