Investment company Mastpoint Ltd was set up in 2009 to hold the shares of former Plymouth Argyle executive director Keith Todd and ex-chairman Sir Roy Gardner, including other tycoons, the super-rich and friends of Prime Ministers, reported This is Plymouth.
The firm was used as a ‘mechanism’ to raise cash when Plymouth Argyle hit the financial rocks in 2008/9 and was established to attract this list of ‘long-term investors’.
It loaned the football club £2.1 million as a second mortgage secured against Plymouth’s Home Park ground.
The abbreviated financial accounts for Mastpoint, covering the period from April 2009 to March 2010, reveal that it loaned Plymouth Argyle £2.14 million with £1.445 million secured by way of a charge over the freehold of the Home Park stadium.
The secured loan of £1.445 million carried a variable interest rate of between 6 and 10 per cent per annum and the remaining unsecured loan carried a 5 per cent interest per annum, with a note that the principle sum and interest is to be repaid after 10 years or earlier at the discretion of the company.
The loan, as stated in the accounts, came with the proviso: “There is some uncertainty regarding the loanee's financial position, however the Directors do not consider that a provision against the loan value is necessary.”
Last year a national newspaper said that with other loans taken into account, investors in Mastpoint may have lost as much as £3 million trying to prop up Argyle as the club slid into administration.
Argyle officially exited administration last November when new owner James Brent's Green Pilgrim Limited took over the club.
However Mastpoint Ltd, and its sister company Mastpoint Finance, has been listed at Companies House as the subject of a ‘proposal to strike off’; this applies when a company requests to be removed from the Companies House register, and dissolved.
The list of Mastpoint investors included list of 11 high net worth individuals, including one of Britain's wealthiest men, two of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair's ‘gang of four’ close friends, the bosses of major international companies and top bankers who are collectively worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
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