Next Stop Wall Street

CF10 recently decided to utilise some of its income from membership fees to purchase shares in Cardiff Blues Limited. The number of shares is small, but the step that the trust has taken in making this purchase is big. The purchase means that:

• Anyone who joins CF10 also now is a shareholder in Cardiff Blues

• While several members of the trust working party are already individual shareholders, the acquisition of shares now enables the trust to attend shareholder meetings in its own right

• Critically, as a shareholder, the trust is entitled to ask the company for the contact details of all its shareholders (we’ve already done so and Cardiff Blues have supplied all details as requested)

• We can now write to shareholders to invite them to join CF10 and to enquire as to whether they would be prepared to proxy their shares to the trust so that we can vote en masse rather than individually.

The last point is particularly important. As we’ve said elsewhere, small shareholders like ourselves already collectively own around 500,000 shares in Cardiff Blues Limited. This is almost 12% of the total number of ordinary shares issued to date- a really sizeable amount; coincidentally, 500,000 shares is also the threshold for board membership.

Despite this ownership model, our influence over how the company operates is minimal because, individually, our holdings are insufficient to exert any power. If we acted in a unified and organised way, the situation would be very different and our views would carry weight-and this is why we’re encouraging shareholders to sign up. We already have 11,000 proxy shares from the existing membership.

Acquiring shares also fits with our long-term objective of having an elected Supporter Director post on the board of the company. While this may be a challenging concept at Cardiff Blues, around seventy leading sports clubs in the UK have Supporter Directors. Swansea City FC, for example, have had this model in place for many years and our friends at the Llanelli Scarlets Trust, Crys16, also sit on the Board.

We’ll be discussing all the above at our second open meeting and first AGM at 7pm on March 8th at Cardiff Arms Park, so please come along. Whether you’re a shareholder or not, sign up for membership and become part of the dynamic supporter organisation at that is CF10. For the miserly sum of £2 you can now become not only a shareholder in the trust, but also in Cardiff Blues Ltd. You know it makes senses-so get to it!