From my point of view, if we're actively (the club) negotiating to buy the lease back from the RFL (and I would imagine they won't let it go for less than they paid (£1.5m?)) then we would seem to have access to a reasonable amount of financing. Unless the story about a loan from the RFL is we want to spread the ground purchase payments over a few years?

It's hard to know what's going on, with no doubt, business confidentiality reasons springing up, which mean information is hard to come by. Pretty obviously the RFL won't want to lose money on the deal, so the £1.5m would probably be a fair price to pay.

They have, of course, already taken payments form the club for use of the ground for, is it 2 or 3 years now, and to be honest, it's all win for the RFL as they put nothing into the ground and the only cost would be sending the lad round to the bank with the cheque. The actual value of the lease can surely only decrease as the years fall away anyway and we must remember it is only for a lease - any increase, in land values for instance, would accrue to the owner, Bfd Met, not the RFL.

I wonder if there is any remnant of the original deal still playing a part. IIRC, it was presented at the time as a deal '[ito secure the stadium for RL[/i' and to protect it from '[ipredatory takeovers[/i', surely they don't think the current owners are 'predatory', and from whose hands the ground must be 'saved'?

The stuff about predatory takeovers to get hands on the land was proven nonsense at the time owing to BMDC owning the land and the lease containing an exclusive RL covenant. It is utterly shaming that the RFL were in any way party to this deceit.

If you recall Lord Peter had borrowed £700k from the RFL and not made one repayment. Seeing the likely outcome they took the only thing of residual value should the club inevitably slide into administration, which probably happened quicker than they expected. It is this secret loan which apparently led the other SL clubs to insist Omar Khan only get 50% Sky money, thereby dooming his efforts to rescue the club.

Indeed. Khan has been very unfairly maligned, yet despite that outrageous and blatant theft of our money by the greedy other clubs, with an RFL complicit in the theft, he still persevered and did in a load of his own hard-earned before it all went tits. The fact that between them, the RFL and the other SL clubs artificially created a non-existent "surplus" which was then illegally divvied up remains as shameful an episode as I can recall.

The irony is that they will probably all end up losing much more, net, after the cash deficit caused by missing at least 2 home and away fixtures against the Bulls is added up year on year.

It was all part of "cutting our cloth". Trouble is they thought we could still make a sweater with only enough material for a hanky.