The decline of City Tattersalls Club - who is to blame? (Chapter 4)

There is no question that City Tattersalls Club has gone downhill dramatically since Tony Guilfoyle started in the top job. But he is only an employee, answerable to the Committee. It is the Committee who are supposed to be in charge, in this or any other members club. So who is to blame ?

Jimmy Chen - gone to the dark side ?
In City Tatts one of the best guides to whether a Committee member is doing anything is to watch the reaction from the rest of the Committee. Anyone upsetting the Committee is probably acting in the interests of members. And this certainly did apply to Jimmy Chen. He was very unpopular with the established Committee from the time he was first elected. We don't know what exactly he did to upset the others but presumably he was asking questions about things that they felt should be left alone.

But he really had them hopping mad when he decided to run for Treasurer in 2009 - against the Committee's nominee, Paul Cavallaro. (Both Chen and Cavallaro are accountants.) To say that the Committee were unhappy about this does not begin to describe their reaction. They were fuming. (This will tell you what the Committee thinks about democratic elections in the Club.) This anger, at his decision to run, reached it's high point (or low point) when another Committee member called him a "chinese c**t" !

Jimmy Chen as Treasurer
Jimmy Chen managed to get elected by a narrow margin. And this gave his supporters some hope that at last someone would probe the mysterious finances of City Tatts. But they were in for a letdown. Jimmy's first Treasurer's Report turned out to be a replica of the useless propaganda that used to flow from Keith Free. All the same empty jargon was there to conceal the facr that the Club was incredibly badly run. In fact Jimmy may not have written the report. Certainly at the AGM he gave every impression that he was seeing it for the first time.

So what has gone wrong ?  Basically there are two possibilities -

1. Jimmy's gone to the dark side - ie. decided to go along with the Committee and stop asking the tough questions. Why would he do that ? Hard to say - but he may have a long term goal to be Chairman and thinks this is the best way of achieving it. If that's what he is thinking he will be very disappointed - the Committee will never support him.
2. He has done nothing as Treasurer because he has been denied the information that would allow him to do anything. This is a real possibility. In reality Mark Cooper (Keith Free's nephew) controls the financial information and may supply Jimmy with the minimum possible. It could be that Jimmy really doesn't know much about the finances of the Club.

But whatever the reason it is clear that Jimmy Chen has been a total failure at discovering the real story of what happens to all the money at City Tatts.


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