I've just had a telephone call, alerting me to the fact that someone is lying about the Sartori bid on the forum. Hence my (brief, I hope) return. No surprises that it is little lickspittle Dave...sigh.
Here are the facts about the "Sartori bid". Donald and Jeremy Faulkner will confirm that they are true, if asked. If necessary, I can simply do an email dump. Which I will do if people keep on lying. I don't give a damn if everyone forgets about Sartori altogether. But I'm not going to let liars propagate a false folklore.
1. Sartori approached me last January and said that he wanted to buy an English football club
2. I introduced him to Donald in February
3. Donald - after doing his own research on Sartori - introduced him to DE shortly after, as DE had indicated that he wanted out and Donald clearly felt that he was a credible bidder
4. After some negotiation, Sartori (with Donald as supporting minority interest) made a bid in March. It was rejected. He made another bid. It was rejected. He made a third bid. It was accepted by DE and went into due diligence
5. As part of due diligence - and responsibly, as the bid had been accepted - Donald and Faulkner introduced Sartori to Kassam in April. They met, twice, in Monaco to negotiate a wrap-around lease on the Kassam Stadium
6. Sartori had hired property consultants to do the due diligence on both Grenoble Road and the likelihood of a move elsewhere. The consultants reported back that buying the Kassam Stadium was total pie in the sky, and moving elsewhere no more than a 30% likelihood in the short to medium term, so he had better make sure to get a solid lease from Kassam.
7. Sartori - as Donald will confirm, if asked - had the backing of Monaco for OUFC to become a partner club if he could get Oxford promoted to the Championship. But not in League 1. Therefore, his plan was to inject significant capital to gain promotion to League 1, either move the stadium or build the fourth stand as part of the new lease with Kassam and start the partnership with Monaco.
8. The deal was due to complete in early to mid June, but on June 8 DE wrote to Sartori to say that the deal was off, and that he had decided that he wanted to continue as owner.
9. Three weeks later, Michael Appleton resigned. Two weeks later than that, I heard for the first time that a new bid had been made for the club (mid to late July) at a higher figure than Sartori/ Donald. A couple of weeks after that, in August, "Tiger" appeared at his first OUFC game and has been hanging around, on and off, more or less ever since.
The Sartori bid is history. No need to discuss it at all (unless it is to set the record straight). And there are no facts to suggest that Sartori would have been successful or unsuccessful. It was well-funded (ask Donald) and the due diligence had been done very, very thoroughly. But he still could have failed. Of course he could.
But if you want to defend Tiger's bid, then just do so on the basis of its own merits (or lack of them). Don't try to pretend that the reason that people have misgivings about Tiger's record is because they are, or were, Sartori supporters. If anyone, including Sartori, had asset stripped any local club, questions would, and should, have been asked. If anyone had spent a whole season hanging around any club behaving as if he were the owner, without having actually brassed up, people would ridicule him, let alone ask questions. These questions have nothing to do with Sartori. They are genuine, obvious questions that only so-called supporters who have been 'bought up' by vested interests would pretend not to be interested in.