The last trace of the boardroom regime responsible for plunging Dundee Football Club into administration and in so doing threatening the very existence of the Dark Blues has been removed from Dens Park.
Benefactor Calum Melville, along with George Knight, one of the men who established the tie up with Melville, yesterday followed ex-chairman Bob Brannan in stepping down from the board.
The departure of that trio leaves just three directors chief executive Harry MacLean, Jim Thomson and fans rep Stuart Murphy, all of whom were only appointed this year-in place to work with joint administrators Bryan Jackson and Ann Buchanan to try to rescue the club.
MacLean admitted last night that the old regime which Ian Bodie walked away from during the summer had been culpable for not securing binding financial guarantees from Aberdeen businessman Melville or reining him in.
“For me the board of directors, over the last 19 months, were naive because they had no written confirmation,” said MacLean. “And I suspect history will look back on this period and judge naivety was a contributory factor to where we find ourselves.
“There was no real plan to build up the structure of the club.
“If someone gave us £1 million now we could build something sustainable, but Calum’sfinancial input was used to try and accelerate promotion to the SPL and it didn’t work.
“To be fair, regardless of the interaction between members of the board and however fractious things might have been since Calum became a director, the money always turned up. So they probably believed it always would.
“But in the end it didn’t and we now find ourselves in administration.’Better advice'”Looking back someone Bob Brannan given his experience or maybe even (former manager) Jocky Scott should have been advising Calum better.
“I know Ian Bodie was uncomfortable with the situation, but no-one was saying no to Calum. Nobody said to him for example that it wasn’t a good idea to pay Partick Thistle and the agents involved in full for Gary Harkins ten days after agreeing a fee,” MacLean added.
“That doesn’t happen in football. Fees are paid in three or four instalments but we paid up in a oner. There was no real guidance available to Calum from within the club.
“So there was a naivety about us in chasing the league by paying out a lot of money. When that failed there was nothing to back it up.
“Up until the beginning of September we were paying the monthly tax bill and putting another £5000 towards paying off the arrears, but from then we found ourselves in a dramatic downward spiral, linked to Calum’s situation with Cosalt.
“That was the catalyst for recent events.
“People will draw comparisons between this and the last time we went into administration.
“The difference is this time the money wasn’t coming from the Bank of Scotland… although I think in the end Calum felt it was coming from the Bank of Calum.”The futureMacLean admitted he has no idea what the future holds for himself but he is clear on the path Dundee must tred and he confessed there’s no guarantee of the club remaining full-time, though that’s the aim.
“It’s up to the administrator to decide what part I along with Jim and Stuart might have to play. But three of us are minded to stay and help until such times as he doesn’t want us.
“If I’m being honest, if I knew when I came in what I know now, I don’t think I’d have taken this job. But I don’t have the benefit of hindsight and now I am here I’ll do my best to steer the club through this.
“I realised from the outset that the structure (being so dependant on a benefactor) was wrong.
“I knew we had to get through to May 2011 when the majority of contracts run out and then work forward from there on a sustainable basis. So in some respects nothing has changed.
“Whether sustainability will involve full-time football I don’t know.
“It depends on what full-time players would be expecting wages-wise in future. No one could come here expecting the kind of money we were handing out 18-24 months ago.”Innocent victimsMacLean acknowledged there had been no more innocent victims of administration than the sacked management team of Gordon Chisholm and Billy Dodds.
“Gordon and Billy were made promises in March when they took on the job…promises which didn’t materialise,” he said. “Their treatment in that regard was unacceptable. They weren’t treated properly.
“The abuse they got from the fans was therefore unjustified. They were working with their hands tied behind their backs all summer.
“People might look at the budget they had compared to other first division sides and think we ought to have done better than we did on the park.
“What isn’t appreciated, however, is that a number of players Gordon and Billy inherited were taking up a certain amount of that budget, forcing us to wheel and deal.
“We had to move on the likes of Chris Casement and Maros Klimpl, for example, to free up space for signings.
“Following the meeting Chis and I had with Calum in Aberdeen we moved on four guys in order to bring two in before it became a case of one in, one out. But even then Chis and Doddsie had to contend with the goalposts being moved.
“They’d be told by Calum they could go get people, when it didn’t fit into the budget. Chis has referred to the Bob Harris incident. That maybe highlighted what I am talking about.
“We hadn’t defaulted with the taxman then but did have a meeting coming up with him. Had we been looking at paying a £15,000-£20,000 fee to Queen of the South I’d have been comfortable.
“But when Queens turned down the initial offer I felt we had to withdraw from the situation.Not prepared to carry on”How could we be going to the taxman saying we wanted to defer payments as we couldn’t afford them then be seen paying big money for a player?
“Whether people liked it or not therefore I spoke to Gordon and said I wasn’t prepared to carry on with it.”
Chisholm in his explosive revelations about his tenure at Dens-had a pop at MacLean for seeking to sound out Barry Smith and Matt Lockwood about taking over the team when he was still in charge.
According to MacLean, however, his actions were entirely well motivated and he acceded to the former manager’s wishes in the matter.
“I understand where Gordon is coming from,” he said. “I have a huge respect both for him and Billy Dodds.
“The only thing I would disagree with him is over the sequence of events regarding my seeking to speak to Barry Smith and Matt Lockwood with regard to possibly taking over.
“No approach was made until after seeking to be honest with them I told Gordon and Billy that I didn’t see them surviving administration.
“The board had previously drawn up different scenarios by way of recommendations for the administrators. We had one involving avoiding administration, one involving wages cuts within administration and another involving redundancies.
“I told Gordon and Billy that if redundancies were to occur I couldn’t imagine them surviving. They had previously asked me for honesty and I felt I owed them that.
“Following on from my telling them where I thought they stood, I asked if they minded my asking Barry and Matt if they’d mind taking the team for the weekend, if the worst happened.
“Gordon objected strongly which I appreciated so we respected his wishes and didn’t make the approach until Friday.”