Trust chair Andy Roberts has replied to allegations made by Northampton Town FC chairman Kelvin Thomas on BBC Northampton's Cobblers Show last week.
The statement is as follows:-
Comments about the Supporters Trust board made by Kelvin Thomas on the Cobblers Show last week cannot go unchallenged.
His wide-ranging allegations, as is often the case, lacked context.
Club correspondence shared with Trust members
In regard to this, we did not do so because the content was both unreliable and actionable.
We would potentially have been taking on liability by sharing it.
If Mr Thomas is so keen to put this correspondence into the public domain he can do so at any time, at his own risk. It’s his correspondence after all.
The Trust's conspiracy-led vendetta against the club
There is no vendetta. If that is his perception of the Trust reasonably questioning the club’s governance and development plans, then in our view it is an absurd overreaction and the questions will continue until we receive satisfactory answers.
Development on land at Sixfields
Despite some talk about the land, there remains no clarity whatsoever.
Nobody who listened last week can be any clearer about what is likely to be built and where.
Will warehouses pop up on all of the land that has been purchased?
Or will there be club and community facilities behind the East Stand?
The Trust are 'rival bidders' to the club
The chairman has repeatedly said that the Trust are rival bidders to the club.
Let me be clear. We were rival bidders for land behind the East Stand which we were looking to secure as a club asset, generating investment benefit.
We took this very difficult decision more than two years ago in the absence of any guarantees from the club that the land in question wouldn't be sold off and so depriving the club of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
It was something that, as a community group, we were perfectly entitled to do under the Localism Act and as part of the Asset of Community Value bid process.
We did so in accordance with the Supporters Trust’s long-held mission statement to protect professional football in Northampton for the long-term.
We did so believing, naively it would appear, that the one thing the club’s owners and the Supporters Trust actually have in common is the safeguarding of the football club.
What did Mr Thomas think we would do with the land - sell it for housing, pocket the cash and disappear into the sunset?
The relationship between the club and the Trust
Tensions in the relationship with the club owners set in from day one.
At an early meeting with the Trust, Mr Thomas stated that he, David Bower and Mike Wailing were old mates, that they went back a long way, that’s how the club would be run and there was no point in having a supporter on the board.
The relationship completely fractured two years ago but, with mediation from the Football Supporters’ Association, I personally tried to broker a way forward.
I met one to one with the chairman, in the presence of the FSA, in December 2022 but the only thing the chairman was interested in discussing was how much money we had in the Trust bank account.
Even when a new board of directors was elected a few months later - following a Not My Trust takeover bid, with senior staff at the club suddenly deciding to join the Trust - the chairman still did not want to know, and this after saying he would sit down with the new board with a view to a fresh start.
No matter, we will keep trying to build bridges and keep hoping for straightforward answers, not unhelpful rants designed to demonise and marginalise a group of volunteer long-standing fans who have had the temerity to ask obvious questions in looking out for our football club.
In conclusion...
In recent weeks we have made a new ACV application, questioned the East Stand progress, consulted with our members on fan-led infrastructure improvements and led a campaign seeking to strengthen the Football Governance Bill around fan engagement. All things a Supporters Trust should be doing.
In 2015, with the club in crisis, we supported the club financially and several board members attended a council meeting to urge the council to back the plans for the East Stand, which is hardly the behaviour of an organisation that is anti-club.
We have never walked away from the football club.
And we never will.
