There seems to be some confusion re making / not making a profit. I recently retired from a very large national non-profitmaking organisation - this incorporated into the Royal Charter!!! The organisation did however operate at a significant trading surpless which was all used for the benefit of the business / ALL i.e. none set aside as profit for distribution to investors!! Co-operatives do not fail because they are not for profit operations but because they have an inadequate business plan in the same way businesses paying profits to stakeholders fail if their business plan is not up to muster!!

Not many messages about Ownerships on here recently.

But another new board is here: (clicky)... to add to all these others:
- the one Allan Richards moved us to: (clicky)
- Malcolm's here: (clicky)
- The Old One here: (clicky) (which has just started with adverts on it presumbaly because AllanRichard's credit card has stopped giving it money)
- The Very Old One: (clicky) - just for the sake of nostalgia

And compliling these inspired a summary of some history:
Background: During 2003 AllenM raised capital of about half a million pounds from his Free Services Scheme (FSS) in order to build a high-tech, seagoing, wide, metal boat “Whisper” (with a patio-door at the back) which he hoped would generate orders for clones and, as he put it, a pension for himself. He told owners their FSS money was being used to build OS scheme narrowboats and published in OwnerSnips magazine that Whisper had nothing to do with OwnerShips and was financed by his bank manager. When it was clear that Whisper was a technical, financial and moral failure, AllenM rewrote the rules of FSS to allow its funds to be used for %%bbCodeItem_1%% boat project. But for each £2,500 capital raised by the FSS, OS surrendered £350 or so of %%bbCodeItem_2%% income, and by 2006 there was a cashflow crisis - even allowing for AllenM’s belief that he had patched-up the moral/legal crisis by retrospectively legitimising the use of his customers’ investments. All that has been published before.

From my letterbox and inbox leading up to the 8May2010 meeting comes news of a May2006 meeting at which AllenM briefed his people about what he called a ‘cashflow crisis’. (The whole document is of course postable if anyone wants to see it.) The briefing document shows the BigBoatFund – that’s the combined Sinking Fund for all the boats - being predicted by AllenM to run out of money in June that year and go into a deficit of about two hundred thousand pounds by the year-end. That’s the fund that has the whole year’s expected boat expenditure paid in by all the owners in advance, by 1January each year. Some time thereafter there was a (small) meeting-over-dinner - AllenM wasn’t there - and the discussion included how to persuade AllenM to retire from active participation in OS in exchange for a pension, and how then to recover from the hole-in-the-OS-finances. This was not ultimately successful, but nonetheless a wholly honourable attempt to protect the Owners' investments that had not already been lost. But AllenM carried on to waste-away most of three million pounds of customers’ and investors’ money. Whether we would have any more information about all this from the 8May2010 meeting, we will never know. Despite asking about the 2006 meeting in my published written questions, I was shouted down before I could ask about it directly.

Any idea what the outcome was of the court hearing in devon last week?