The interview lasted nearly an hour, during which Peter gave us answers to every question we put to him. Your question may not feature word for word as quite a lot overlapped each other, but we have tried our best to ask every question which was asked. We think we did alright
You can listen to the interview by CLICKING HERE , you will need Windows Media player, and the audio lasts for 50 minutes.
The Dialect has been copied word for word (Thanks Merry_Miller) for you to read.
MillersMad:: Evening Peter,
Peter: Evening Rich,
Peter: Evening Martin,
MillersMad: Thanks for having this interview with us, we have been asking fans questions and have got a lot to put to you and you will be responding.
First of all we will start with club finances. Where is the money coming from?
Peter: The money is coming from existing revenue streams and basically what that is, is money from the football league which every club gets which will be reduced if we get relegated which now looks likely, season ticket sales and match day sales and whatever commercial income we can generate, that’s what we are playing around with on a day to day basis, which is what finances players, keeps the staff paid all that, and that’s what we have got to make work on its own two feet and hopefully we can improve that because the more we can do that the more we can spend hopefully on players and spectator comfort and so on.
Separate finance is to do with the stand and they are completely separate and we will probably come onto that later in one of the other questions.
MillersMad: There is talk of a share issue how is that going to work?
Peter: The share issue is to existing shareholders, because we can’t by law have a public share issue, well we could do but would have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and would probably get less back than that sum, and in any case the club has only relatively few employee’s and you can’t have hundreds of thousands of shareholders as the club wouldn’t be able to administer the whole thing, we are trying to do an awful lot in a short space of time, so the easiest and most cost efficient way of trying to get some new money is to go to existing shareholders,
however Millers 05 which is essentially myself (Peter R) Trevor Smallwood, David Veal, John Harrison and also the small amount we put to RUST already through RUST funds, they control 86% of the shares, so that’s about well in broad terms about 270,000 shares, so if we issue 3 new shares for each 1 existing share there is a lot of shares to play with. So what we have always said is and what we are still going to do is, that those shares are available to be allocated to us, we can reallocate them privately to a number of people to try and get a spread of ownership, and that’s why we have got this pecking order and amongst the pecking order is 25.1% to RUST as a body, and what we said to RUST is if you can raise us a certain amount by sponsorship then pound for pound upto three hundred thousand pounds, you can have three hundred thousand shares, which is about 25.1% so that’s how it works. The Important thing is that individual people won’t get individual shares, not because we are against that, it’s just practically and legally we can’t do it, and in any case you will still get the same sort of shareholder participation but through RUST, in other words through a RUST representative, and you will elect him and so on. It all gets a bit complicated it’s not really but that’s the way we can achieve new money and get a spread of ownership so we don’t get one person owning the club and using it like a toy and doing what they will. It’s got to be a broad base of ownership from all sections of the community. That’s how we get on the community based approach. 
MillersMad: So if you say I’ve got a few hundred pounds and just want to buy shares, I would have to do that via RUST.
Peter: Yes, at the moment we are talking to a number of people that we have highlighted, sorry who have been interested before I think you will be aware Rich through RUST and the efforts that RUST made to canvas all the community we had a database and we got interested parties, that was then eventually distilled down to more or less a handful of people and they may take big blocks of shares, which are probably £10,000 upwards sort of investment and privately we are speaking to those people because they have been in from the start, and this is to get us a long way in a short space of time. In the future we will look at whatever is open to us, if we can do a general share issue if that’s what happened, the idea is to get everybody joining in as much as we can possibly can.
MillersMad: Have you been speaking to Neil Freeman at all, has he been in contact?
Peter: No, no he hasn’t, in fairness we haven’t had time to go out and speak to any of these people, but I did speak to Neil Freeman before we took over and outlined to him what we were talking about and said there would be an opportunity, if one person who would have an opportunity to invest it was him, and he’s certainly on the list.
MillersMad:: If we don’t reach the target set for next season financially, what then?
Peter: It’s like every business, business is uncertain you take your best forecast, we have just come out of a board meeting and we were talking about just this, you have all your different buffers lined up, what if that doesn’t happen, what if that doesn’t happen (etc) It’s like every business i’m afraid it’s uncertain, it’s even more uncertain when you have got those 11 guys on the pitch and knowing what they are going to do, because as we all know you live or die by what happens on the pitch, you know you can be as clever or smart as we think we are, but it’s down to the playing side at the end of the day.
MillersMad: If some of us invest in to the club via RUST with the share option, would they have access to the classical projections and statements and stuff like that?
Peter: Yes because we are going to make them public anyway, it isn’t that big a deal frankly, yes some of the stuff of course can be sensitive, we can’t disclose the players contracts because they wouldn’t like that and so on, but certainly in broad terms anyway there are going to be no secrets, there never really has actually, you know the annual accounts and stuff, the problem about cashflow’s is they change every week you know depending on how you have done you know, you might have happiness before the Gillingham game, and misery after the Gillingham game when nobody turned up you know, but sorry just in principle there is quite a lot of information that will come out and has come out and will continue to come out when the whole thing has been decided and developed, there is just such a lot of work to get through.
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