Stephen Vaughan

[BP1960]

If he's "fronting a consortium" could that not mean he's just brokering a deal and may ultimately have no involvement in the club?

 

Not according to this;

 

Ade Daramy of the Insolvency Service said: “If you are subject to this undertaking then you are banned from being in the shadows or someone acting as your proxy.

 

Also the Stephen Vaughan rumour needs to be quashed asp, any potential signing reading the BBC Sports news today could become jittery.

Edited June 3, 2013 by BP1960

[De_La_Vega]

I love that first line on his Wikipedia page - that is total class!

 

As for the rest of this story - it cannot be the case that we are looking at selling up to a goon like that. Don't believe it.

[Frankly Mr Shankly]

I don't know what everyone's getting so het up about to be honest. He practically kept Huddersfield Town up last season with his goals and he's got tons of higher division pedigree. We'd scare anyone off we would.

[Alec1954]

There is another StephenVaughan ex Walsall and businessman involved with Gloucester rugby couldn't be him could it fronting a diff consortium?

[JonesyOAFC]

This is the bloke who thinks he is a gangster isn't it.

 

The one who jumped a copper?

 

The one who has :censored:ed Barrow and Chester?

 

Sounds like he'll fit right in.

 

Bust by Christmas.

I seem to remember reading that he was somehow involved with Curtis Warren as well. As in Scouse drugs baron Curtis Warren. Definitely seems an ideal person person to takeover our club

[singe]

 

Oh aye, would worry me too. Although I doubt Vaughan would be stupid enough to sack LDJ, paying him off in the process, just to give Sammy Lee the job.

It's not impossible that LJ has always meant to be the number 2 (just that he ended up babysitting us in the meantime) for Sammy Lee to come in as number 1. Stranger things have happened...most notably since the 5-year plan evaporated...

 

The answer as to why the forthcoming amazing season ticket deal disappeared, never to be spoken about again might be about to show itself. That for me was a major red flag in the rumours I'd been hearing about Vaughan and co.

I cannot quite see that happening BB80, but I think that sacking LJ and putting Sammy Lee in charge would nowhere near rank the most stupid thing that Vaughan has done.

[singe]

There is another StephenVaughan ex Walsall and businessman involved with Gloucester rugby couldn't be him could it fronting a diff consortium?

Given Barry's response, I think that can be discounted.

[ghostofcecere]

YEY, the conspiracy theories are back in abundance!!!

[Guest Scratch2000uk]

I wonder what the stumbling blocks are?

[ghostofcecere]

The main stumbling blocks are probably they have no money and have not made an offer that's acceptable

[BP1960]

The main stumbling blocks are probably they have no money and have not made an offer that's acceptable

 

Or they have money, but their plans are not acceptable.

[oafcprozac]

From 200% Meat on the bones as it were...

 

 

There are some football clubs that seem to be in a perpetual state of flux and crisis. One such club is Chester City where, over the last two decades or so, there has been mismanagement on such a grand scale that one wonders how unlucky a club can be to have run into such problems so regularly. Chester have already been relegated once from the Football League and won promotion back, but they were relegated again last season and it seems unlikely that they will be able to repeat the trick. With the club’s current playing staff reportedly down to single figures and an embargo brought in by the Professional Footballers Association meaning that they cannot sign experienced replacements, their outlook looks bleak. The major question now is exactly how bleak this future will be.

 

The club went into administration at the end last week, the final chapter in an agonising season during which they were the worst team in the Football League (they were kept from bottom place by Luton Town’s thirty point deduction). There is, however, a wider issue at stake here regarding the Football Association’s rather limp definition of who may be defined as being “fit and proper” to run a football club, since the club’s chairman, Stephen Vaughan, has a little bit of “previous” with regard to the mismanagement of football clubs. Supporters of Barrow AFC (who Chester may or may not – more on this shortly – be playing in the Blue Square Premier next season) may be forgiven for saying “we told you so”.

 

Vaughan is a boxing promoter from Merseyside, and became involved at Barrow in the mid-1990s. Initially he was successful, and the club won promotion to the Football Conference in 1998, but Vaughan resigned as chairman after an investigation by HMRC into money laundering and his links with the Liverpool gangster and drug trafficker Curtis Warren. He reinstated himself when he was cleared of any involvement (it was said at the time that he had used security provided by Warren at his boxing events and acted as a middle man in his property deals, but drew the line at money laundering), but Barrow were already said to be in serious financial difficulties and Vaughan resigned as chairman and removed his financial backing in November 1998, although he retained his shares in the club.

 

Barrow were liquidated in January 1999 (a new company, Barrow AFC (1999), was formed in its place) and were demoted back to the Unibond League at the end of that season, but their problems were only just beginning. They almost didn’t start the following season (indeed, they started the 1999/2000 season a month late), but this was a comparatively small problem next to the fact that Vaughan had transferred ownership of the club’s Holker Street stadium into the name of his company, Vaughan Promotions, as repayment for the money that he had poured into the club before this money ran out. The liquidator Jim Duckworth, however, smelled a rat and took him to court over it. In 2002, Holker Street was returned to the liquidators, who sold it back to the new directors of the club for £265,000.

 

Vaughan turned up at Chester City in 2001, but immediately ran into controversy again when Chester were drawn to play Barrow in the FA Cup Fourth Qualifying Round. Since Vaughan still owned shares in Barrow, the FA threatened to expel both clubs from the competition, but Vaughan sold the shares in Barrow for a nominal sum to Bobby Brown, a painter and decorator, for £1 a couple of days before the match. He bought them back after the match (which Barrow won 1-0) and then sold them to the directors of the new company for £29,500, but his links to the club weren’t fully severed until the court found against him over ownership of the ground. The FA’s handling of the matter was widely criticised at the time, and it is a reflection upon the weakness of the rules regarding club ownership that Vaughan has remained in charge at Chester without censure.

 

Vaughan’s time at The Deva Stadium hasn’t been without controversy. On the pitch, the Chester were successful again – having been relegated from the Football League in 2000, they were promoted back in 2004 – and Vaughan also oversaw improvements to their facilities. However, in February 2007 he was charged with violent conduct by the FA following an incident in the players tunnel after a match against Shrewsbury Town. In November of that year, the club held a minute’s silence for one Colin Smith, who was announced by the club as “a major benefactor” to them. Afterwards, however, it became clear that Smith was nothing of the sort – rather, he was the right hand man of Curtis Warren, and had been murderedoutside a gymnasium in the Speke area of Liverpool in a gangland hit. Vaughan resigned as chairman shortly afterwards, but remains as the club’s owner and a majority shareholder. In January 2008, he was charged with fraud and deception in relation to car finance, and was cleared.

 

In March 2009 and with Chester sliding out of the Football League again, it was announced that Chester had sold out to Liverpool based property developer Gary Metcalf. Metcalf (whose son, and you may need to read between the lines here, is a Liverpool-based boxer) was all but announced to have bought the controlling stake in the club, but at the start of April Chester supporters established that ownership of the shares had instead passed from Stephen Vaughan into the name of his son, Stephen Vaughan Junior, a twenty-four year old that had played fifty-eight times for Chester. Vaughan Junior had made seventy appearances for Liverpool reserves, but it would be stretching credibility somewhat to suggest that this would give him the means to run the club. Metcalf, who may or may not be linked to the Vaughans, is still said to be interested in the takeover of the club, but this has so far come to nothing. Vaughan Senior is believed to have said that he is owed between two and four million pounds by Chester City.

 

What, then, does all of this mean for Chester City? Well, the involvement of the administrators could be good news for the club. If the Supporters Trust can lobby them stating that it is in the best interests of all concerned that the club’s ownership is passed to them, they could theoretically take it over. It isn’t, however, that simple. If, as many believe, the transfer of ownership of Chester City into Vaughan Junior’s name was to ensure that Vaughan Senior didn’t get an administration marker against his name when the club were declared insolvent, then it could be more complex than that. Indeed, if Vaughan Senior is the club’s biggest single creditor, then he will hold the ace hand in dealings with the administrator, and he may simply inherit the club again with its debts wiped clean.

 

Chester supporters’ best hope comes in the form of the authorities. The FA is a broadly different beast to the one that allowed him to run roughshod over their own rules regarding club ownership in 2001, and the Football Conference are notoriously tough over insolvency. They have it within their powers (in a way that not even the administrators do) to shape the destiny of Chester City Football Club. The Football Conference has an agreement with the Football League that it will accept two relegated clubs per season, but they relegated Boston United straight into the Blue Square North and then into the Unibond League because of financial irregularities. Certainly Vaughan Senior’s previous run-ins with the game’s authorities and his associations outside of the game are unlikely to engender much sympathy within those running at the game. At best, Chester will start next season ten points behind everyone else, but things could yet turn out to get much, much worse for them before they get any better.

 

http://twohundredpercent.net/

 

2nd Article from 200%

 

 

It’s a familiar enough scene to anybody that has ever been to the movies. The bad guy gets shot, and some soothing music is played but, just as the audience settles down after the previous few minutes of tension, the music cranks up a notch and what we thought was his lifeless hand grips the handle of his gun again. There are some people in life who just keep bouncing back, and this afternoon the website of the North West Counties League published an announcement that will have raised eyebrows from Cumbria to Cheshire – the return, after a short absence, of the Vaughan family to non-league football.

 

We can only presume that, this time around, there were no clubs in the area that would take them on, since their newest venture seems to be a completely new club, which will be named Widnes Town FC. This new club, if accepted into the English league system, intends to play its home matches at Halton Stadium, the 13,350 capacity home of Widnes Vikings RLFC and Everton’s reserve team. The ground was also one of the final resting places of the late Runcorn FC Halton, who sold their own ground to move there in 2000, before leaving the ground in 2005 because they were unable to maintain the rent on it. The club folded a year later.

 

The new club will be chaired by the former England international Mark Wright, and managed by Stephen Vaughan Junior. Vaughan Junior, some of you may recall, played for Chester City when it was under the ownership of his father, before quietly becoming the owner of the club in April of 2009, just a couple of months after the club entered into administration, which was the event that would eventually come to be the death knell for that club by February of the following year. Vaughan Senior would later find himself disqualified from acting as a company director for eleven years and in prison for assaulting a police officer.

 

To get the fuller picture on The Vaughans, though, we have to go back a little further in time, to the late 1990s. Vaughan Senior had taken ownership of Barrow AFC in the middle of the decade, resigning as chairman in November 1998. The club was liquidated in January of the following year, and it was as a part of the insolvency process that the liquidator, Jim Duckworth, established that he had illegally transferred the ownership of the club’s Holker Street ground into the name of Vaughan Promotions, one of his companies. The courts agreed and Holker Street was passed back to the liquidator, who sold it to the new owners of the club.

 

Vaughan turned up at Chester City in 2001, but immediately ran into controversy again when Chester were drawn to play Barrow in the FA Cup Fourth Qualifying Round. Since Vaughan still owned shares in Barrow, the FA threatened to expel both clubs from the competition, but Vaughan sold the shares in Barrow for a nominal sum to Bobby Brown, a painter and decorator, for £1 a couple of days before the match. He bought them back after the match (which Barrow won 1-0) and then sold them to the directors of the new company for £29,500, but his links to the club weren’t fully severed until the court found against him over ownership of the ground.

 

On the pitch, the Chester were having some success – having been relegated from the Football League in 2000, they were promoted back in 2004. However, in February 2007 he was charged with violent conduct by the FA following an incident in the players tunnel after a match against Shrewsbury Town. In November of that year, the club held a minutes silence for one Colin Smith, who was announced by the club as “a major benefactor” to them. Afterwards, however, it became clear that Smith was nothing of the sort – rather, he was a right hand man of Curtis Warren, and had been murdered outside a gymnasium in Liverpool ina gangland hit.

 

What happened to Chester City was thoroughly documented on the pages of this site, but this wasn’t the only sporting pie in which the Vaughans had a finger inserted at that time. Vaughan Senior had started acquiring shares in Widnes Vikings RLFC in 2002, and had completed his take-over of the club by 2006. In November 2009, Vaughan was disqualified from acting as a director of any company for a period of 11 years, following his involvement in a £500,000 VAT fraud whilst a director of the club. The type of fraud committed is known as “carousel fraud”. Vaughan had arranged for the club to purchase three consignments of clothing from a UK company and on the same day sold the clothing to a company based in Spain.

He then attempted to reclaim VAT for the club, but HMRC refused the repayment of the clubs claim. Payment for the goods was made viaa based in the Dutch Antilles, which was subsequently closed down by the banking authorities when it was discovered that it provided banking facilities to a significant number of companies involved in this type of fraud. All of this meant that Vaughan Senior now failed the FA’s Fit & Proper Persons Test, but this didn’t prevent him from acting as the de facto owner of Chester City until the club’s demise at the start of the following year. Widnes Vikings RLFC, meanwhile, ended up in administration before being purchased by a local businessman.

 

Vaughan Senior was released from prison in September of last year, with Vaughan Junior having taken care of Vaughan Boxing, his other company, while he was residing at her majesty’s pleasure. We might have hoped that they would decide to stay away from football from now on, but the involvement of Vaughan Junior and Wright at this new venture would seem to indicate the return of Vaughan Senior to the game, even if his name isn’t on any of the legal documents. The irony of the Vaughans being back in Widnes, where his actions almost killed one of the original twenty-two rugby clubs that formed the Northern Rugby Football Union in 1895 will not be lost on supporters of that club.

We should, perhaps, look on the bright side. At least they’re setting up a club of their own, meaning that there is no chance that they will ruin somebody else’s club. It’s also worth bearing in mind that rent on the Halton Stadium is likely to be quite high. It’s not out of the question that Vaughan’s boxing promotions company has raised enough money to cover this, but the question who in their right mind would turn out to support such a team is one that is worth asking, and the idea of a semi-professional football club being remotely sustainable without the regular income of supporters seems fanciful, to say the least.

 

The North West Counties League’s secretary John Deal has today confirmed that, “as this approach is from a new club we have had to refer the matter to the FA as per National League System Regulations”, and we shall await with interest what their verdict is. With Vaughan Junior managing and Mark Wright chairing, the official aim is to “develop the club into a community-based football facility.” Precious little of the Vaughans’ previous involvement in football has had anything to do with the best interests of communities. What, we might well ask, will be so different this time around?

 

http://twohundredpercent.net/

Edited June 3, 2013 by oafcprozac

[oafc-latics]

he's on twitter, if anyone wanted to tell him the best pubs or curry houses around...

 

@vaughanboxing

[singe]

he's on twitter, if anyone wanted to tell him the best pubs or curry houses around...

 

@vaughanboxing

and you want a horses head on your pillow...!

[singe]

vaughan classic tweets. He's got Bradley Orr by the short and curlies Stephen Vaughan ‏@vaughanboxing 2 Jun

@bradleyorr2 good to see you yesterday mate give us a shout if you want to come over

 

 

 

 

Bradley Orr ‏@bradleyorr2 2 Jun

@vaughanboxing boss day mate,safe flight and speak to u soon mate !!!

</ol>

 

 

 

 

1. Sam Rowlett ‏@samkrowlett 25 Apr
   
2. 
   @vaughanboxing no thanks the first time was bad enough and the same can be said for Malta!
   

• 
  
  1. 
     Stephen Vaughan ‏@vaughanboxing25 Apr
     
  2. 
     @samkrowlett no thanks to me what can be said for Malta :censored:in idiot
     

• 
  
  1. 
     
  2. 
     Sam Rowlett ‏@samkrowlett25 Apr
     
  3. 
     @vaughanboxing proving your class once again. Well done
     

• 
  
  1. 
     
  2. 
     Stephen Vaughan ‏@vaughanboxing26 Apr
     
  3. 
     @samkrowlett do us a favour stop following me and go away
     

• 
  
  1. 
     
  2. 
     Sam Rowlett ‏@samkrowlett26 Apr
     
  3. 
     @vaughanboxing I don't follow you, never have. Your boring me now #growup #getoverit #chesterareback #champions #getthemessage
     

1. 
   
2. 
   Stephen Vaughan ‏@vaughanboxing26 Apr
   
3. 
   @samkrowlett I'm boring you go away then and stop messaging me Chester are back good for you now the hard work begins
   

• 
  
  1. 
     
  2. 
     Sam Rowlett ‏@samkrowlett26 Apr
     
  3. 
     @vaughanboxing stop biting and I will!
     

1. 
   
2. 
   Stephen Vaughan ‏@vaughanboxing27 Apr
   
3. 
   @samkrowlett tell you what I'm home next week come and meet me put your big mouth to test
   

[Forte_Baby]

He tried to enter a Widnes team into the North West Counties League last season (not to be mixed up with the team who have been accepted now) http://www.runcornandwidnesweeklynews.co.uk/runcorn-widnes-news/runcorn-widnes-local-news/2012/03/15/widnes-town-fc-is-refused-bid-to-play-at-vikings-stadium-55368-30533615/

 

http://www.amazon.com/wiki/Widnes_F.C.

 

http://nonleaguezone.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=90417

[BP1960]

On the wonderful transfer rumours website one poster says;

 

Oldham Atheltic are set to be taken over by a consortium, led by Brian Keen. Keen is currently chairman of Barrow in the Conference North.

 

It gets more frightening by the minute.

Edited June 3, 2013 by BP1960

[SholverBlue]

Haven't we got any nearer drug dealers or gun runners who could buy us? Let's keep it local.

[Lee Sinnott]

Haven't we got any nearer drug dealers or gun runners who could buy us? Let's keep it local.

 

Jose Baxter...?

[SholverBlue]

Jose Baxter...?

 

I was thinking more Al Pacino in Scarface. With Yonner accents. And dodgy Hollands pies instead of Cocaine.

[OneSizeFitz]

He's persistent, I'll give him that.

[BP1960]

Haven't we got any nearer drug dealers or gun runners who could buy us? Let's keep it local.

 

Contact Strangeways, they may be able to help.

[BP1960]

On the wonderful transfer rumours website one poster says;

 

Oldham Atheltic are set to be taken over by a consortium, led by Brian Keen. Keen is currently chairman of Barrow in the Conference North.

 

It gets more frightening by the minute.

 

Brian Keen, described as a combination of Del Boy and Alan Sugar.

 

http://www.in-cumbria.com/news-archive/engineering-boss-keen-to-follow-in-father-s-footsteps-1.954077?referrerPath=news-archive/magazine-articles

[BP1960]

Brian Keen, described as a combination of Del Boy and Alan Sugar.

Would it surprise anyone if he's part of the Vaughan consortium?

 

http://www.in-cumbri...gazine-articles

[Witty]

The answer as to why the forthcoming amazing season ticket deal disappeared, never to be spoken about again might be about to show itself. That for me was a major red flag in the rumours I'd been hearing about Vaughan and co.

 

The sudden pulling of the season ticket offer was bizarre to say the least and as you say a massive red flag.

 

How would this saga have affected season tickets sales if it had come out last week? Is there something in the timing here?