Sixfields' East Stand is a painful reminder of the misery that may never fully heal
Sixfields' East Stand is a painful reminder of the misery that may never fully healThe good news is that you can at least watch a match from Northampton Town’s East Stand now. Its seating is split into two.Behind them, work is still in progress. The project is on track, the club say, to be completed in the first quarter of 2025, with hospitality areas, a link road around Sixfields Stadium, extra car parking spaces and a new concourse area for the seats in the stand.
Work did start but, by 2015, it had been temporarily stopped due to what the club described as a “contractual dispute”. The council continued to reiterate that the money must be paid back and the club’s players received their wages late.In November 2015, the police were formally contacted by the council to ask them to investigate whether any criminal offence had taken place over the use of the loan money.At a similar time, a report by the BBC claimed that David and Anthony Cardoza were “loaned” £2.5m by a company formed to oversee the stadium’s development.
“How many more years are we going to look at that stand, empty and earning us nothing? We are playing with people’s livelihoods here.”Within a couple of days, Kelvin Thomas completed his purchase of Northampton Town from the Cardoza family and acquired CDNL.Thomas paid non-playing staff, who had gone two months without wages, and promised to spend an initial £1m before committing extra funds to the development of the East Stand further down the line.
Sticking with Mackintosh, in November 2017, it was claimed that the figure of the payments he received totalled £39,000. The council had already applied for an injunction that the proceeds of a sale of a home owned by David Cardoza’s wife should be kept by solicitors, and were successful.The case took until 2019 to complete, as Judge Simon Barker called Anthony Cardoza “untrustworthy and unreliable”, ordering him to repay £2.1m to the council. David Cardoza was ordered to pay an undisclosed sum as part of the same judgment.
Later that same year, property developer Howard Grossman, who was in charge of 1st Land Ltd, was banned from running any company for a period of 10 years for his inability to provide records for where £5m of the loan money had gone. Northampton Town were kept in limbo too. With the work not completed and the local authority insisting that the land next to the stadium could not be sold until the work on the stand had been finished, a term of the original agreement, the East Stand stayed as it was.A new deal was finally reached in November 2021 for the land to be sold to County Developments Northampton Ltd , owned by the football club.
It consisted of just 25 words, as if acutely aware that supporters have heard far too many thousands of those over the last decade and not enough action.
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