NEW Dumbarton owner Mario Lapointe has rubbished suggestions he has bought the League Two club so he can build houses on the land around the stadium – and stressed he will be unable to develop property there even if he wants to.
French-Canadian electronics entrepreneur Lapointe – a singer-songwriter whose stage name is Vintage – completed his takeover of the former Scottish Cup winners earlier this week.
The Quebec-based 57-year-old, who has been a hockey and football coach in his homeland for the past 20 years, stressed that he is determined to make the club profitable off the park and successful on it in the coming seasons.
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“The fans will always have that suspicion about some guy coming in,” he said. “But there is no temptation there for me. I can't destroy nothing. I am all for this and have no problem with how things are set up.
“You have the community trust. That is not an entity I am involved with. It's a non-profit that was already there before I arrived. This community trust’s role is to get the artificial turf. They put it on this land and rent it to me for, say, a dollar.
“We need to turn the facility into a community hub. We need to get the artificial grass down. That turf will help us have that seven-day activity going. It has to be win-win everywhere.
“I could have built housing around my place in Canada. It would have been much easier. I'm not coming across the pond to build housing.”
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Dumbarton have only been able to exit administration by becoming a new company – and Lapointe revealed that was the only route available to him.
“When I approached them, I was thinking it was a bankruptcy,” he said. “Usually with a bankruptcy, you're looking at paying 20 cents on the dollar or whatever. But it wasn't that.
“There's particulars I can't talk about because they have me on an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Forming a new company was the only option. We weren’t allowed to do anything else actually.”
