Portsmouth administrator on creditors picking FA Cup team: ‘Rubbish’

By Nick Harris

5 May 2010

EXCLUSIVE

Portsmouth’s administrator, Andrew Andronikou, has told sportingintelligence today that suggestions the club’s creditors could have a say in the line-up of Pompey’s FA Cup final team are “total rubbish”.

Andronikou is set to meet the creditors tomorrow and will take questions from them about his work so far. But, contrary to reports elsewhere, he will not be making any offer of settlement tomorrow. Nor will he be seeking creditors’ views on the FA Cup team.

With most of Portsmouth’s players having contractual entitlements to bonuses arising from playing in and / or winning an FA Cup final, it had been suggested these bonuses might influence what Andronikou can offer creditors, and even that Andronikou could canvass creditors for their views.

“Nonsense,” he said. “That’s total rubbish.”

He insisted that issues surrounding bonuses have been or will be sorted out before the final against Chelsea on 15 May. “It’s not an issue that’s going to effect the CVA [to exit administration],” he said.

Portsmouth went into administration in February and Andronikou has since confirmed the debts are more than £100m, a fact that sportingintelligence exclusively revealed first in graphic detail with scans from the creditors’ report on 21 April.

Andronikou will meet the creditors tomorrow at Fratton Park and outline his plans for Pompey to exit administration via a Company Voluntary Arrangement. “Within a week to 10 days, I will make a formal offer [to creditors for settlement of debt],” he told this website. Creditors will have 28 days from the date of offer to accept or not, with the outcome revealed at a meeting likely to take place in early June.

Andronikou will not confirm what the offer will be, but it is expected to be around 23p in the pound.

If creditors holding 75 per cent or more of the debt accept the offer, Portsmouth will exit administration via the CVA. If the 75 per cent threshold is not reached, Pompey will again face the prospect of being wound up. Andronikou expects the club to survive, somehow.