Dubai International to make bid for Liverpool FC

[homer1]

Which bit of the "to keep it simple for you all you have to do is answer yes or no" did you not understand?

(And by the way, I'd rather have a Mondeo than a BMW 'cos they're less common!)

Understood it perfectly mate - just don't think it's as simple as "it's better than the original so it's all good"

You are right that it is significantly better than the original design and I do like it a lot, however I completely understand people's reservations and disappointment when they reveal to the world extraordinary plans and then state they can't afford it and have to down size

If they had replaced the original design directly with the ones revealed today I think everyone would be delighted with the improvement but I do think G&T, not for the first time jumped in making announcements that they couldn't / wouldn't back up which has led to the scepticism around

[disco]

CAD I'm listening mate but explain this to me.

In regard the debts taken on by Kop football and LFC, can you shed light on how this part of the debt is to be paid off and who is liable for it. From my understanding of the legal position LFC won't be liable for Kop Football Ltd's debts or defaults. Given that LFC is the only asset of Kop football rom where will they be drawing down assets to pay back this loan? What happens to LFC if KFL defaults?

It's smoke and mirror finances mate. The whole fianancing shinbag is held together with rubber bands and sellotape. I think you may be disapointed if you think that Gillette and Hicks will fund us until the stadium is built. I think we'll see very meagre pickings transfer-wise until the stadium is built. Very meagre indeed.

It has to be dividends from the club. But it seems unlikely that there would be any dividends of any significance until the stadium is built (assuming we're 'competitive' in the transfer market), so they'd have to fund it themselves (or more-likely taking out loans to cover the interest payments)

It's this bit of detail I'm very interested in knowing.

The problem is simply that (without seeing the latest set of accounts, or even better estimates of revenues under the new TV deal, even without CL football) the profit stream doesn't come along for 3-4 years. So in the meantime they'll need to find £80-120m in interest payments over that period.

We were previously paying 5-10m pa on debt repayments in the previous regime, so £10m more (given the new TV deal) doesn't sound onerous.

But of course this is speculative arithmetic because the 2006 accounts are 18 months out of date.

[Liverta 78]

Why Liverpool fans are wrong to suck up to DIC

by James Montague | Guardian (link)

I'm not sure if this has been picked up yet. It's a bit of a wake up call from someone who has lived and worked in Dubai and for me the end of calling for a DIC takeover.

As Liverpool stuttered to an unconvincing draw with Aston Villa on Monday night, their fans held banners proclaiming 'Yanks Out, Dubai In', sang songs attacking Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and all-but-begged Dubai International Capital to rescue the club's soul. To no avail: Hicks and Gillett are about to secure a £350m loan to refinance their takeover, and the prospect of DIC taking over at Anfield now seems remote. To most Liverpool fans, this week's developments are a disaster. But perhaps they should be seen as a blessing. Because while DIC might be more wealthy than Hicks and Gillett, they carry a lot more baggage too.

DIC is the investment arm of Dubai Holding, a wholly government-owned company that has interests in everything from logistics to island building. And by government-owned, we mean almost solely owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the absolute ruler of Dubai, vice-president of the UAE and one of the richest men in the world. Which is the problem. The ethical probity of who buys your football club has been brought in to sharp focus by Thaksin Shinawatra's capture of Manchester City. And when you start to strip away at Dubai's gleaming façade and phenomenal economic growth, one fact glares out: if DIC bought Liverpool, the club would effectively be owned by a dictator. A benign dictator, but a dictator nonetheless.

I'll come clean up front. I have a special affection for Dubai, having lived there for 2½ years, writing for Time Out magazine. And a good time it was too. The sun shone, wages were tax-free, life was good. But soon it became clear that the protestations that Dubai was a liberal, free enclave in the Middle East weren't all that they were cracked up to be. Articles were regularly censored or pulled so that they didn't upset the Sheikh. "You can move around the edges," one editor told me. "But you cannot question Sheikh Mohammad's vision for Dubai".

One piece on Dubai World's purchase of P&O - another Sheikh Mo funded initiative that caused a political storm in the US - almost got me the sack. But that's the problem when you live under a system where one man, ultimately, has absolute power and can take your business off you at a moment's notice: everyone walks on eggs shells to avoid antagonising him.

In fact the UAE is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, in the same bracket as Cuba and North Korea. Dubai makes up one of seven Emirates ruled by their own royal families. Limited elections were held recently but they were for the largely meaningless Federal National Council and only covered 1% of the 800,000 strong national population. The last index of democracy by the Economist placed the UAE 150th out of 167, two places below that paragon of democratic virtues, Zimbabwe.

Still, for the lack of democracy, you have the Dubai economic miracle to point to. Sheikh Mohammed must take enormous credit for transforming a sleepy little pearling port into one of the richest patches of land on the planet in a few decades. The problem is that Dubai's mega-structures and glitzy, eye-catching projects are built on the backs of an army of grossly exploited migrant workers. Allegations of non-payment of wages, passport confiscations, physical abuse, non-existent healthcare coverage, awful pay and appalling health and safety are rife among the UAE's half-a-million construction workers.

I saw the conditions first hand in the summer of 2006. In a camp on the outskirts of Dubai, a few minutes' drive from the gleaming opulence of the Burj Al Arab hotel, construction workers building the Dubai Mall (the largest and most expensive mall in the world) at the Burj Dubai site (the tallest and most expensive building in the world), sat 10, 15, 20 to a room. Most had come from the Punjab and earned less than £75 a month for back-breaking work in up to 50-degree heat, six days a week. Raw sewage leaked from overhead pipes into the filthy communal bathroom and kitchen. One Indian man, with tears in his eyes, told me he was suicidal because he couldn't return home. He'd taken out a loan against his family's land back home to pay for his visa, as most of these men had done. If he went home, his family would be homeless. The employers knew this, he said, and drove down wages accordingly.

Conditions had got so bad that riots began to break out on the site and Human Rights Watch published a scathing report on labour abuse in the Emirate. "One of the world's largest construction booms is feeding off of workers in Dubai, but they're treated as less than human," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North African director at HRW. "It's no surprise that some workers have started rioting in protest. What's surprising is that the government of the UAE is doing nothing to solve the problem."

A draft labour law was introduced last year but according to HRW it is just a drop in the ocean and key areas, like the right to unionise, have been ignored. Violators of labour laws are rarely punished in any case due to insufficient monitoring, although the negative publicity might now be getting through to the very top. "Sheikh Mohammed is embarrassed by the criticism that the labour issues have drawn," Nicholas Labuschagne, an executive at Dubai Holding, told the US magazine Architectural Record. "We're hoping we can show some very significant progress within the next six months."

But by far the most disturbing story emerged at the beginning of last year. Sheikh Mohammed and his brother, along with others, were served with a class action lawsuit in Miami for their part in the alleged abuse of underage child camel jockeys. (The case was dismissed on the technical ground that the US courts did not have the jurisdiction to try it). The Sheikh is well known in horse racing circles. His Godolphin stables in Dubai are world famous and he hosts the Dubai World Cup, the world's richest horse race every year. But his penchant for camel racing is less well known. According to the Ansar Burney Trust, a charity that brought the issue to the world's attention, boys as young as four were kidnapped in their thousands from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan and forced to ride in camel races. The lighter the jockeys, the better. So the boys were systematically starved and beaten. Others, it is alleged, were raped or beaten to death and buried in a shallow unmarked grave in the desert.

Camel racing in the UAE is huge business, with the top camels changing hands for millions of dollars, but the revelations of the boys' conditions forced some action. Child jockeys were banned and replaced with robots. But according to the Ansar Burney Trust, thousands of young boys are still unaccounted for and unborn children are smuggled into the UAE and Qatar to breed the next generation of jockeys.

You can poke holes in anyone's character given a long enough stick. But the vociferous calls from the Anfield Kop for a Dubai-led rescue mission smack more of desperation than a desire to reconnect with the club's core values. Hicks and Gillett may have made some stupid mistakes, but do they really compare that badly to an owner tainted by controversy and who apparently has little interest in football, only in furthering the cause of Brand Dubai? Sometimes, it's better the devil you know.

[John_Gotti]

Why Liverpool fans are wrong to suck up to DIC

by James Montague | Guardian (link)

I'm not sure if this has been picked up yet. It's a bit of a wake up call from someone who has lived and worked in Dubai and for me the end of calling for a DIC takeover.

As Liverpool stuttered to an unconvincing draw with Aston Villa on Monday night, their fans held banners proclaiming 'Yanks Out, Dubai In', sang songs attacking Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and all-but-begged Dubai International Capital to rescue the club's soul. To no avail: Hicks and Gillett are about to secure a £350m loan to refinance their takeover, and the prospect of DIC taking over at Anfield now seems remote. To most Liverpool fans, this week's developments are a disaster. But perhaps they should be seen as a blessing. Because while DIC might be more wealthy than Hicks and Gillett, they carry a lot more baggage too.

DIC is the investment arm of Dubai Holding, a wholly government-owned company that has interests in everything from logistics to island building. And by government-owned, we mean almost solely owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the absolute ruler of Dubai, vice-president of the UAE and one of the richest men in the world. Which is the problem. The ethical probity of who buys your football club has been brought in to sharp focus by Thaksin Shinawatra's capture of Manchester City. And when you start to strip away at Dubai's gleaming façade and phenomenal economic growth, one fact glares out: if DIC bought Liverpool, the club would effectively be owned by a dictator. A benign dictator, but a dictator nonetheless.

I'll come clean up front. I have a special affection for Dubai, having lived there for 2½ years, writing for Time Out magazine. And a good time it was too. The sun shone, wages were tax-free, life was good. But soon it became clear that the protestations that Dubai was a liberal, free enclave in the Middle East weren't all that they were cracked up to be. Articles were regularly censored or pulled so that they didn't upset the Sheikh. "You can move around the edges," one editor told me. "But you cannot question Sheikh Mohammad's vision for Dubai".

One piece on Dubai World's purchase of P&O - another Sheikh Mo funded initiative that caused a political storm in the US - almost got me the sack. But that's the problem when you live under a system where one man, ultimately, has absolute power and can take your business off you at a moment's notice: everyone walks on eggs shells to avoid antagonising him.

In fact the UAE is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, in the same bracket as Cuba and North Korea. Dubai makes up one of seven Emirates ruled by their own royal families. Limited elections were held recently but they were for the largely meaningless Federal National Council and only covered 1% of the 800,000 strong national population. The last index of democracy by the Economist placed the UAE 150th out of 167, two places below that paragon of democratic virtues, Zimbabwe.

Still, for the lack of democracy, you have the Dubai economic miracle to point to. Sheikh Mohammed must take enormous credit for transforming a sleepy little pearling port into one of the richest patches of land on the planet in a few decades. The problem is that Dubai's mega-structures and glitzy, eye-catching projects are built on the backs of an army of grossly exploited migrant workers. Allegations of non-payment of wages, passport confiscations, physical abuse, non-existent healthcare coverage, awful pay and appalling health and safety are rife among the UAE's half-a-million construction workers.

I saw the conditions first hand in the summer of 2006. In a camp on the outskirts of Dubai, a few minutes' drive from the gleaming opulence of the Burj Al Arab hotel, construction workers building the Dubai Mall (the largest and most expensive mall in the world) at the Burj Dubai site (the tallest and most expensive building in the world), sat 10, 15, 20 to a room. Most had come from the Punjab and earned less than £75 a month for back-breaking work in up to 50-degree heat, six days a week. Raw sewage leaked from overhead pipes into the filthy communal bathroom and kitchen. One Indian man, with tears in his eyes, told me he was suicidal because he couldn't return home. He'd taken out a loan against his family's land back home to pay for his visa, as most of these men had done. If he went home, his family would be homeless. The employers knew this, he said, and drove down wages accordingly.

Conditions had got so bad that riots began to break out on the site and Human Rights Watch published a scathing report on labour abuse in the Emirate. "One of the world's largest construction booms is feeding off of workers in Dubai, but they're treated as less than human," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North African director at HRW. "It's no surprise that some workers have started rioting in protest. What's surprising is that the government of the UAE is doing nothing to solve the problem."

A draft labour law was introduced last year but according to HRW it is just a drop in the ocean and key areas, like the right to unionise, have been ignored. Violators of labour laws are rarely punished in any case due to insufficient monitoring, although the negative publicity might now be getting through to the very top. "Sheikh Mohammed is embarrassed by the criticism that the labour issues have drawn," Nicholas Labuschagne, an executive at Dubai Holding, told the US magazine Architectural Record. "We're hoping we can show some very significant progress within the next six months."

But by far the most disturbing story emerged at the beginning of last year. Sheikh Mohammed and his brother, along with others, were served with a class action lawsuit in Miami for their part in the alleged abuse of underage child camel jockeys. (The case was dismissed on the technical ground that the US courts did not have the jurisdiction to try it). The Sheikh is well known in horse racing circles. His Godolphin stables in Dubai are world famous and he hosts the Dubai World Cup, the world's richest horse race every year. But his penchant for camel racing is less well known. According to the Ansar Burney Trust, a charity that brought the issue to the world's attention, boys as young as four were kidnapped in their thousands from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan and forced to ride in camel races. The lighter the jockeys, the better. So the boys were systematically starved and beaten. Others, it is alleged, were raped or beaten to death and buried in a shallow unmarked grave in the desert.

Camel racing in the UAE is huge business, with the top camels changing hands for millions of dollars, but the revelations of the boys' conditions forced some action. Child jockeys were banned and replaced with robots. But according to the Ansar Burney Trust, thousands of young boys are still unaccounted for and unborn children are smuggled into the UAE and Qatar to breed the next generation of jockeys.

You can poke holes in anyone's character given a long enough stick. But the vociferous calls from the Anfield Kop for a Dubai-led rescue mission smack more of desperation than a desire to reconnect with the club's core values. Hicks and Gillett may have made some stupid mistakes, but do they really compare that badly to an owner tainted by controversy and who apparently has little interest in football, only in furthering the cause of Brand Dubai? Sometimes, it's better the devil you know.

Bollocks but true. My question to the writer is this: do we in the "Western world" live in a democracy?

At least they do their's in the open. What was the UK's wealth built on? And if he is that worried, why is he living there and earning their dollars?

[shanks69]

Which bit of the "to keep it simple for you all you have to do is answer yes or no" did you not understand?

(And by the way, I'd rather have a Mondeo than a BMW 'cos they're less common!)

plus the new mondeo is better looking and equiped than most bmw's now.

[Vermilion]

Bollocks but true. My question to the writer is this: do we in the "Western world" live in a democracy?

At least they do their's in the open. What was the UK's wealth built on? And if he is that worried, why is he living there and earning their dollars?

[RedJedi]

Mihir Bose (sp) is gona be on 5live in a min talking about the Liverpool situation

[Skillz]

DIC themselves don't have that much cash to operate with. It's the Sheikh that is the cash man behind DIC. That points to that it's DIC that want to invest in us and not the Sheikh.

They need cash to buy the club.

I think I got that right.

You should treat that report with the same level of trust as you do all reports, ergo **** all

[el matador]

Why Liverpool fans are wrong to suck up to DIC

by James Montague | Guardian (link)

I'm not sure if this has been picked up yet. It's a bit of a wake up call from someone who has lived and worked in Dubai and for me the end of calling for a DIC takeover.

As Liverpool stuttered to an unconvincing draw with Aston Villa on Monday night, their fans held banners proclaiming 'Yanks Out, Dubai In', sang songs attacking Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and all-but-begged Dubai International Capital to rescue the club's soul. To no avail: Hicks and Gillett are about to secure a £350m loan to refinance their takeover, and the prospect of DIC taking over at Anfield now seems remote. To most Liverpool fans, this week's developments are a disaster. But perhaps they should be seen as a blessing. Because while DIC might be more wealthy than Hicks and Gillett, they carry a lot more baggage too.

DIC is the investment arm of Dubai Holding, a wholly government-owned company that has interests in everything from logistics to island building. And by government-owned, we mean almost solely owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the absolute ruler of Dubai, vice-president of the UAE and one of the richest men in the world. Which is the problem. The ethical probity of who buys your football club has been brought in to sharp focus by Thaksin Shinawatra's capture of Manchester City. And when you start to strip away at Dubai's gleaming façade and phenomenal economic growth, one fact glares out: if DIC bought Liverpool, the club would effectively be owned by a dictator. A benign dictator, but a dictator nonetheless.

I'll come clean up front. I have a special affection for Dubai, having lived there for 2½ years, writing for Time Out magazine. And a good time it was too. The sun shone, wages were tax-free, life was good. But soon it became clear that the protestations that Dubai was a liberal, free enclave in the Middle East weren't all that they were cracked up to be. Articles were regularly censored or pulled so that they didn't upset the Sheikh. "You can move around the edges," one editor told me. "But you cannot question Sheikh Mohammad's vision for Dubai".

One piece on Dubai World's purchase of P&O - another Sheikh Mo funded initiative that caused a political storm in the US - almost got me the sack. But that's the problem when you live under a system where one man, ultimately, has absolute power and can take your business off you at a moment's notice: everyone walks on eggs shells to avoid antagonising him.

In fact the UAE is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, in the same bracket as Cuba and North Korea. Dubai makes up one of seven Emirates ruled by their own royal families. Limited elections were held recently but they were for the largely meaningless Federal National Council and only covered 1% of the 800,000 strong national population. The last index of democracy by the Economist placed the UAE 150th out of 167, two places below that paragon of democratic virtues, Zimbabwe.

Still, for the lack of democracy, you have the Dubai economic miracle to point to. Sheikh Mohammed must take enormous credit for transforming a sleepy little pearling port into one of the richest patches of land on the planet in a few decades. The problem is that Dubai's mega-structures and glitzy, eye-catching projects are built on the backs of an army of grossly exploited migrant workers. Allegations of non-payment of wages, passport confiscations, physical abuse, non-existent healthcare coverage, awful pay and appalling health and safety are rife among the UAE's half-a-million construction workers.

I saw the conditions first hand in the summer of 2006. In a camp on the outskirts of Dubai, a few minutes' drive from the gleaming opulence of the Burj Al Arab hotel, construction workers building the Dubai Mall (the largest and most expensive mall in the world) at the Burj Dubai site (the tallest and most expensive building in the world), sat 10, 15, 20 to a room. Most had come from the Punjab and earned less than £75 a month for back-breaking work in up to 50-degree heat, six days a week. Raw sewage leaked from overhead pipes into the filthy communal bathroom and kitchen. One Indian man, with tears in his eyes, told me he was suicidal because he couldn't return home. He'd taken out a loan against his family's land back home to pay for his visa, as most of these men had done. If he went home, his family would be homeless. The employers knew this, he said, and drove down wages accordingly.

Conditions had got so bad that riots began to break out on the site and Human Rights Watch published a scathing report on labour abuse in the Emirate. "One of the world's largest construction booms is feeding off of workers in Dubai, but they're treated as less than human," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North African director at HRW. "It's no surprise that some workers have started rioting in protest. What's surprising is that the government of the UAE is doing nothing to solve the problem."

A draft labour law was introduced last year but according to HRW it is just a drop in the ocean and key areas, like the right to unionise, have been ignored. Violators of labour laws are rarely punished in any case due to insufficient monitoring, although the negative publicity might now be getting through to the very top. "Sheikh Mohammed is embarrassed by the criticism that the labour issues have drawn," Nicholas Labuschagne, an executive at Dubai Holding, told the US magazine Architectural Record. "We're hoping we can show some very significant progress within the next six months."

But by far the most disturbing story emerged at the beginning of last year. Sheikh Mohammed and his brother, along with others, were served with a class action lawsuit in Miami for their part in the alleged abuse of underage child camel jockeys. (The case was dismissed on the technical ground that the US courts did not have the jurisdiction to try it). The Sheikh is well known in horse racing circles. His Godolphin stables in Dubai are world famous and he hosts the Dubai World Cup, the world's richest horse race every year. But his penchant for camel racing is less well known. According to the Ansar Burney Trust, a charity that brought the issue to the world's attention, boys as young as four were kidnapped in their thousands from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan and forced to ride in camel races. The lighter the jockeys, the better. So the boys were systematically starved and beaten. Others, it is alleged, were raped or beaten to death and buried in a shallow unmarked grave in the desert.

Camel racing in the UAE is huge business, with the top camels changing hands for millions of dollars, but the revelations of the boys' conditions forced some action. Child jockeys were banned and replaced with robots. But according to the Ansar Burney Trust, thousands of young boys are still unaccounted for and unborn children are smuggled into the UAE and Qatar to breed the next generation of jockeys.

You can poke holes in anyone's character given a long enough stick. But the vociferous calls from the Anfield Kop for a Dubai-led rescue mission smack more of desperation than a desire to reconnect with the club's core values. Hicks and Gillett may have made some stupid mistakes, but do they really compare that badly to an owner tainted by controversy and who apparently has little interest in football, only in furthering the cause of Brand Dubai? Sometimes, it's better the devil you know.

Despite all of these allegations (true or not )sometimes rich people do bad things to get richer. Its not the right way and although we all want DIC to own our club, we all need to ask ourselves do DIC know the Liverpool Way.

Are they fit custodians of our club and will they keep our heritage and honour. Its all very well liverpool having quaresma, villa and co on the pitch but at what cost ?

The lives of innocent people... Not for me thanks.

[Liverta 78]

Mihir Bose (sp) is gona be on 5live in a min talking about the Liverpool situation

cheers

[AFII]

Bollocks but true. My question to the writer is this: do we in the "Western world" live in a democracy?

At least they do their's in the open. What was the UK's wealth built on? And if he is that worried, why is he living there and earning their dollars?

The Sheikh is only doing what he must do to build up Dubai. The Western world built up their countries in the same way. If he didn't do it this way then Dubai wouldn't have a chance to compete and grow. I'm not defending him but there is some reasons to why he acts the way he do.

It's very, very bad but not any different from the Western world around 100-200 years ago.

The camel jockeys is the thing that is the worst and that is totally unacceptable.

The Western world is using Africa in the same way now and have done that the last centuries.

[mancdetester]

Bollocks but true. My question to the writer is this: do we in the "Western world" live in a democracy?

At least they do their's in the open. What was the UK's wealth built on? And if he is that worried, why is he living there and earning their dollars?

I think he says he " lived there "
If what he says is true , wouldnt you have a slight pang of conscience?

[el matador]

Mihir Bose (sp) is gona be on 5live in a min talking about the Liverpool situation

missed it can anyone let me know if he said anything ?

[CAD]

CAD I'm listening mate but explain this to me.

In regard the debts taken on by Kop football and LFC, can you shed light on how this part of the debt is to be paid off and who is liable for it. From my understanding of the legal position LFC won't be liable for Kop Football Ltd's debts or defaults. Given that LFC is the only asset of Kop football rom where will they be drawing down assets to pay back this loan? What happens to LFC if KFL defaults?

It's smoke and mirror finances mate. The whole fianancing shinbag is held together with rubber bands and sellotape. I think you may be disapointed if you think that Gillette and Hicks will fund us until the stadium is built. I think we'll see very meagre pickings transfer-wise until the stadium is built. Very meagre indeed.

G&H will be liable for the debt in KFL. LFC will pay interest of course. G&H are responsible for the loan. The debt will continue to exist until they sell LFC. The world of finance is a jungle and I will not try to pretend that I understand every corner of it. Rushscored346 will probably do a better job than me explaining. If KFL defaults then G&H has lost their invesment and LFC would probably be sold off to the highest bidder. As long as LFC clocks in a revenue there will be no risk of a Leeds scenario. G&H could sell now and probably pocket a handsome profit. Hicks is convinced they will make a lot more long term and is prepared to carry us until someone will meet his valuation. I don't believe for one second that we will see a fumble from Hicks when it comes to financing. This is all ABC for G&H. Only a major crash in the global economy will upset G&H. Just like it would effect Glazer.

We have two greedy Americans on our hands, courtesy of Mr. Moores. They will try to carry us until the Stadium is in place. They might sell sooner. They will do everything in their power to dress LFC up and make her look as attractive as possible when the time comes. To put too much debt on the club wouldn't make much sense at all. With the new stadium and the likely increased revenue on TV and marketing/sponserdeals Hicks/Gillett expect the club to triple or even quadruple the value over the next 4/5 years. That is why they are here.

And I agree entirely with your last paragraph. It's sadly not likely that we will have the funding needed to challenge in the PL until the stadium is in place. Like I said earlier - who should we blame for this?


PS: On another note about debt. Companies are expected to have debt. If they do not have debt it is likely to effect the stock in a negative direction. I remember Reuters posting a record revenue with a giant plus on the balance in 99 (if I recall correctly). There stock took a negative beating immediately on the exchange because the professional investors claimed that they were not pushing the business to the maximum.

[Bob]

We paid them off after the 'Parrybowl' design. The new tender cost us nothing extra but used up a lot of AFL's pay-off which is their problem. Having met some of the AFL Directors, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of smug *******s...

See i feel awful turning down a quote/proposal (we have to get more than one though), but normally that's just a twenty page document with a few quick webpage designs chucked in - a day's work. But a whole stadium... well, that's a lot to do for possibly nothing.

I suppose it happens in marketing as well. A big risk-to-tender though. Poor ****ers.