Chester City’s largest supporters group City Fans United today issue a challenge to Palle Rasmussen, the man behind the internet based “Chester is Danish” consortium, to present his plans for the future of their football club or to admit that his scheme to purchase the debt riddled historic Club is no longer feasible.
The committee of CFU, speaking on behalf and at the request of its 900 strong membership would also like to ask Rasmussen to explain why his meeting to broker a deal for the Club did not contain any owners or directors of the Club? In fact the only person present at the meeting who used to be a board member of the Club, Stephen Vaughan, is currently banned from being a Director of any business for 11 years. A stipulation of this banning order means that he “may no longer act as either an active or inactive director, or exercise control over an individual who is a director, of any company.”
Mr Rasmussen has been complicit in the breaking of this rule, and may now face questioning during the inevitable investigation of this.
City Fans United would also like to press Mr Rasmussen on why he feels that no British based business people have come forward to purchase the Club, if the deal is so good? Why would local Chester City supporting business people with substantial funding available not come forward and purchase the Club they have supported since they were children? City Fans United would ask Mr Rasmussen to speak to local businessmen, and ask them why they have not bought shares from Mr Vaughan, and how many shareholders (including the supporters) lost their money when Mr Vaughan put the last Chester City Ltd company into administration?
We ask these questions as the correspondence that we have received regarding the above topics comes not from just within the Chester supporting community, but from within local and national government figures, football supporters and football clubs from around England and Wales. Most tellingly of all though, are the messages and questions we have received from members of Mr Rasmussen’s “Chester is Danish” group. Our friends from Denmark are telling us that they would not dream of getting involved in any scheme that was not acceptable to the local supporters, whom one Dane referred to as “the life of the Club”.
We are reiterating that this deal is NOT acceptable to the local Chester supporters, and would repeat our request that the offer be withdrawn, as per Mr Rasmussen’s first statement. We have attempted to contact Mr Rasmussen to discuss this privately yesterday and today, but he refuses to acknowledge our emails, this despite publically claiming to have dialogue with us “several times a day”. We have not actually heard from Mr Rasmussen since he childishly insulted ourselves and our members on his blog, and referred to our historic, 14th century Guildhall as a “bingo hall”.
As we have told our friends from Denmark who have contacted us, we would be delighted and honoured to have members of City Fans United from Denmark, and would honour them within our pubs, clubs and bingo halls should they come over to watch their adopted, local supporter owned community football Club. But we would ask that they think again about supporting Mr Rasmussen’s “Chester is Danish” scheme to tread all over our dreams and wishes for this 125 year old part of our community, our history and our lives.
We will fight to secure the future of football in Chester for as long as it takes.