Saw this article after I posted.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sport/afl/story/0,26576,24796538-19763,00.html
Eddie's set for long haul
Glenn McFarlane | December 14, 2008 12:00am
COLLINGWOOD'S Eddie McGuire will remain president as long as the members want him in the wake of the club's $8 million loss on two Melbourne pubs. Dismissing speculation he could relinquish the post he has held for the past 10 years, McGuire said he intended to stay on to help restock the club's coffers as soon as possible.
"My job is to do what I have always done at the Collingwood Football Club, and that is to make money," he said ahead of what could be a fiery annual general meeting at the MCG on Wednesday night.
"The reason I got involved at Collingwood was to make it bullet-proof. We are, but it is a hard way to find that out by going through a disaster. Now we've got to build up again."
McGuire said the losses associated with the Beach Hotel in Albert Park and the Diamond Creek Tavern had been shattering in a financial and personal sense, but said the club was debt-free and looking to the future.
He admitted the situation could have been more disastrous had the club not posted profits on an annual basis in his time.
"The situation is that the pubs' deal could have potentially had a 30-year tail for the Collingwood Football Club," he said.
"It hasn't. Look, I took on mistakes that happened over a long period of time when I became president 10 years ago.
"Yes, the club made a mistake with the pubs, but what I am not doing is leaving it all to someone else. We will cop the whack and we will fix it."
He said that, unlike some AFL clubs, the Magpies had sold most of their shareholding before the global financial crisis.
McGuire hopes to put the pubs' issue to bed on Wednesday night, saying the club had been open in dealing with the mess.
"We have known about the situation for 18 months. This is ancient history in our minds," he said. "As soon as all the information came through, the club went into action. Gary Pert and I went on The Footy Show, we spoke to the papers and on radio. The pubs are gone, so is the money. But we will fix it."
Part of the sensitivity surrounding the issue is that two figures from the club at the time, then chief executive Greg Swann and then chief operating operator Eugene Arocca, are chief executives at Carlton and North Melbourne.
"The people we had put in place came up with the recommendation. I had no reason not to have a firm belief in them because they were the people who had helped us have the $10 million in the bank," McGuire said.
He said he was living in Sydney at the time, and said he was not as close to the action as he should have been. But he accepts that, as president, the buck stops with him.
"I take responsibility, not necessarily for what happened, but for fixing it up," he said.
"There is nothing I can do about it now, but I can make sure it never happens again."
McGuire has conceded he perhaps should have given up the presidency when he moved to Sydney as chief executive of the Nine Network.
"When I got on to the plane to go to Sydney (to live), I probably should have resigned for two years and then come back again," he said. "I was on top of everything before I went to Sydney, and then, for two years, perhaps I wasn't. But now I am all over it again, terrorising everyone."
The Magpie president said he was confident the club would win back the losses, even against a tough economic backdrop.
The first part I highlighted:not going too well ed ;D
The other part I highlighted is eddies typical modus operandi. Has digs at others quickly, to make sure people don't think he is the bad guy, then acts like he's the white knight coming in to save everything.
The thing with that part that I highlighted isn't what he said that shows what kind of a person he is, it's what he didn't say. He was on the board when those decisions were made, but hasn't said he stuffed up, "the people we put in place came up with the recommendation....", neglected to mention, "....which included myself...."
