We started by addressing the reason we had contacted Dave in the first place.
He made clear the main issue that he has with the leaflet handed out before the Southport game was the statement "the club has had its authorised overdraft facility withdrawn, leaving it with severe cash flow problems and a big tax bill due soon."
Dave told me, "This simply is not true. The club haven't actually had an overdraft facility for a while as it has been operating in the black, certainly since the Dwight Gayle deal, but Steve Thompson identified that we were heading into a point in his financial projections where we might need one so we approached the bank. In the new financial climate NatWest, who we have always banked with, told us that they did not offer overdraft facilities to organisations such as ours. So there we were."
"This kicked off discussions at board level regarding what we could do to raise money. The club has always worked off sponsors, donations, directors loans. I suggested that if all the board members put in a figure to fill the hole. Some agreed, some didn't. This is part of the problem, we have a diverse group of directors, some of whom are very active, some of whom are not, and some which have resources to invest and some not. To be honest the club needs a shake up."
Dave confirmed that, "The short term hole was filled by a directors loan, which is far from unusual and has been done several times in the past and was repaid within a couple of weeks."
Dave stated that his annoyance with the leaflet was a result of this statement setting the tone for everything that followed in it. "It's making us look like we are in the shit, that the bank don't trust us and have taken an overdraft away. This is just not true. Everything that follows in the leaflet is tainted by this."
The next issue with the leaflet was regarding Glenn Tamplin's renaming of an existing shell company to become Dagenham & Redbridge FC (2016) Ltd.
Dave told me "At the very first serious conversations we had with Glenn Tamplin and his solicitor once it became clear that he wanted to invest and come on board, the solicitor told Glenn that if the deal proceeded he would have to have a new company set up to do enable this. This was early June. Glenn had this company dormant, which is not unusual in business, and made the name change the next day. OK he didn't waste any time doing it, but he had been advised to do so."
"This name change was either leaked by an interested party, or else someone just happened to be looking in the right place by co-incidence, and that kicked off the furore around it," said Dave. "Someone seems to have been looking for this, and may have known what they would find and was stirring things up by leaking it."
Dave was insistent that the original figures discussed of £1.25m over five years for 80% of the club had originally come from John East.
Dave explained the process once the outside offer came forward. "Once the Tamplin offer emerged, David Ward was in agreement in putting this forward one day, then the next was part of the other consortium. He is sitting on the fence, he just wants to remain in the boardroom. The Goodwins I don't know very well but I obviously know of Lee's status within the club as a player. No fan was more pleased than I was when he got a few minutes of League football."
"The truth is that the offer from them is just not enough. If it had been more, closer to a million perhaps, they would probably be running the club now, but it simply is not enough," Dave told us.
Regarding the online abuse that had caused Glenn Tamplin to duck out of the meeting scheduled for the 6th July, we asked for what this was. Dave pointed out that some of the comments on the Daggers Forum had been very close to the mark, and that there was a lot of name calling going on." We pointed out that "tampon" was in fact a telephone autocorrect of "Tamplin" which made Dave smile.
DiggerDagger pointed out that there was a Glenn Tamplin twitter account but it was dormant, and that no Facebook page could be found. All comms seems to come through the AGP Steel twitter account. So what was the abuse?
It seems actually that Tamplin may have got cold feet. "Glenn could see that the fans were against him, and was being asked by his business associates why he was investing £1.25m when the alternative was a fraction of that for the same piece of the company and pulled out," said Dave.
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