The history of the Trust
The Crystal Palace Supporters' Trust was formed as a result of the financial crisis that followed Mark Goldberg's disastrous reign as chairman of the club. Having stretched his resources to buy Palace in 1998 from the previous owner, Ron Noades, Goldberg then spent so freely that within a matter of months under his control the club had gone into administration.
With little sign of a rescue on the horizon, the Trust decided it had to raise a large sum of money in a short space of time if it was to play any material part in saving the club. Palace's debts when they went into administration totalled more than £20m.
We decided the best way to achieve this would be to ask for loans, but we knew that we had to set up a watertight scheme and a properly constituted organisation if we were to succeed in encouraging fans to part with their hard-earned cash. We therefore decided to set ourselves up as an Industrial and Provident Society. The structure of this organisation reflected our democratic and community-based principles and, moreover, allowed us to raise funds in a way which would not otherwise have been possible. We were the first Trust to do this and our example and our constitution have subsequently been taken as a blueprint by supporters' trusts at other clubs up and down the country.
Nearly 1,000 people attended the launch of our appeal at the Fairfield Halls. The Trust was enthusiastically supported by Steve Coppell, the Palace manager, and within a matter of weeks we recruited nearly 4,000 members. We asked members who could afford to do so to lend the Trust a minimum of £1,000 each. In a short space of time we raised more than £1m in loans. We opened a shop near Sainsbury's - Altonwood, the owners, gave us a very good deal on a short-term basis - and fans flocked there on matchdays. The shop was also manned by volunteers during the week.
Throughout this period we were talking to those parties interested in saving the club, including the Football League and Football Association. In particular we maintained a dialogue with the financier Gerry Lim, who spent a long time trying to put together a package to save the club.
We first made contact with Simon Jordan in the spring of 2000, having heard that he was interested in saving Palace. A meeting in his office in Slough convinced us that he was serious and that he was a genuine Palace fan with the club's best interests at heart. However, he was clearly having difficulty getting access to Palace's books to enable him to table a proper bid; the administrator was still insisting that the deal with Gerry Lim was all but done.
For months we had called on the administrator to actively pursue alternative bids in case the Lim deal fell through. A meeting of creditors at the end of May gave us the opportunity to press Simon Paterson on this personally. Two Trust Board members attended the meeting as proxies and demanded to know why Mr Jordan was not being given access. Under pressure, and following consultation with his lawyer, Mr Paterson agreed to grant it.
Mr Lim himself had been getting very frustrated at the continuing failure to sew up a deal. Before one meeting with him, the Trust came up with an idea. Mr Lim had clearly done a lot of work on the prospective purchase. Mr Jordan, meanwhile, was very keen to do business but could not because Mr Lim already had a deal. We asked Mr Lim if he would do a deal with Mr Jordan and we put the two men in contact with each other. The rest, as they say, is history. When the deal to take Palace out of administration was announced in the summer of 2000, it emerged that Mr Lim and Mr Jordan had done business and that Mr Jordan was the new owner.
Before he had even launched his takeover bid, Mr Jordan had made it clear to the Trust that he was not comfortable with the idea of using our loan capital fund to buy a stake in the club. However, this did not stop us from backing him at an early stage. We supported him because of his commitment to direct all resources into the development of the club, his track record as a businessman and, not least, his background as a Palace fan.
Despite his reservations about us buying equity in the club, Mr Jordan had talked enthusiastically about giving us a place on the board. However, after a subsequent meeting between Trust representatives and Mr Jordan and an exchange of letters, he informed us that he would not be offering us representation on the board. We had put forward a set of proposals outlining how the Trust and the club could work together, but Mr Jordan decided that he did not want to involve us. He also said that he did not want to accept any financial support from the Trust. In the circumstances, the Trust Board felt there was no alternative but to repay all the loans.
At a subsequent annual general meeting of Trust members it was agreed that, despite Mr Jordan's decision not to involve the Trust in the running of the club, the Trust should keep its organisation in place in case of future need. It was also agreed that the Trust should seek to maintain a healthy bank balance in case it needed to spring into action again.
Since then, the Trust has deliberately maintained a low profile. The current Board do not believe it is in their brief to pass comment on the running of the club, so long as its future is not in jeopardy. While we remain disappointed at Mr Jordan's failure to involve us in the running of the club, we acknowledge that that is his prerogative. We have had meetings with the club during the summer of 2003, at the end of 2005 and at the start of 2006 to discuss ways in which the Trust might help.
