Death Stalks The CPO As Crunch Date Looms

Ok, that was all rather dramatic. Roman Abramovich's teams of trained killers are not finding the loudest anti-move CPO shareholders and killing them with ice picks. That sort of thing is sooooo last century.

Anyway, the Say No CPO campaign* asked Chelsea to give them a list of CPO shareholders so that they could (presumably) go out and start canvassing them with dire threats about how Chelsea are going to move to Milton Keynes or Kuala Lumpur or Sedna or wherever it takes to scare people into going along to October 27th's meeting and voting 'no'. Chelsea promptly gave them a 600 page binder (speaking of last century) listing the names of shareholders that appears to be at least five years old. Said list includes one prominent shareholder who is now deceased - former CPO chairman Tony Banks, who died in 2006, and there are certainly going to be more zombie shareholders in said list.

*I hate campaigns of any stripe, incidentally. They always seem so needy. Even when I agree with them.

Obviously, that's not ideal. Chelsea, for their part, have no reason whatsoever to keep that sort of thing up to date, and I have no idea why anyone would they that it's their responsibility to do the paperwork for a completely separate organisation, but someone sure should have been and it's a bit of a joke that the No campaign isn't being given the tools they need in order to go and talk to shareholders. It's actually worse than 'they might be dead', too - there's no reason to believe contact information is anything like current, and so there'll be no way to get in touch with many of the names listed, alive or no.

Someone had to be taking care of this, and it seems clear to me that the responsibility lies with the CPO itself. Whether or not they're obligated to then provide that data to folks who are at odds with their leadership is an open question, but this all seems a little off to me.