MORTON Club Together bosses insist their members will have full control over whether to allow prospective new investors in the door at Cappielow.

The fans ownership group held an EGM last week where a vote was passed to allow its board to negotiate with mystery backers who say they want to put money into the Ton by snapping up blocks of shares.

Members were overwhelmingly in favour, by 182-13, to continue the process after three approaches were made - and they also secured a final say in the form of a vote which will veto or confirm deals.

MCT's Gordon Ritchie, who chaired the meeting, told the Tele: "It was not a vote in favour of selling the shares but a vote that allows us to proceed to the next stage, which is to develop and hopefully finalise negotiations with interested parties.

"Then we will take the final details back to the membership for a final sign off.

"It will be for them to decide whether they agree with what we are doing or not - this is the first step in a process that we have to go through if want to sell shares in the club.

"It is the MCT members that have the final say if and when we sell them and to who we sell them.

"Once we strike a deal with investors which we think is suitable and one that we can recommend to the membership, we will get everybody back together again and put the proposal before the members and they can have their say."

Mr Ritchie has warned that the process could be a protracted one which will take some time to finalise.

He said: "I don’t expect things to move on quickly, I expect it to be a lot of hard work with quite lengthy discussions to try and fine tune what has [so far] been discussed in very general terms.

"I wouldn’t be expecting to be going back to the members quickly with a [final] proposal.

"I think it will take some time to come to an agreement with investors, so it could be several months before we go back to the membership."

Mr Ritchie says it is important to take time to get the best possible deal to inject fresh investment into the club.

He said: "This lets us explore an option for funding for the club.

"There are other things going on behind the scenes to generate revenue for the club as well, but this is one option that we are now allowed to go and explore further and see if this is a way of securing additional investment in the club and the team.

"It is not a situation where we get the EGM vote in place and then we sit down with the investors, strike a deal straight away and then go back to them the next week.

"It is going to take a bit longer than that for it all to come to fruition, it is quite a complicated transaction.

"It still may come to nothing - the investors may decide they don’t want to proceed, or we may decide that we are not comfortable with the fit of the company that wants to buy into the club, so there is still a long way to go before we can shake hands on a deal."