Pirates open books, explain payout to owners
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The Pirates made $5.4 million in profit in 2009, owner Bob Nutting said Sunday, after two years of much greater profits and a complex distribution of $20,443,000 to the team's ownership group two years ago.
In an afternoon meeting with four media outlets at PNC Park that Mr. Nutting and team president Frank Coonelly described as being aimed at a leak to the Associated Press of the team's 2007 and 2008 audited financial books -- the report was published tonight -- Mr. Nutting gave unprecedented detail about the team's financial history since he took over as controlling owner in early 2007.
"The presumed implication that anyone in the ownership group is lining their pockets is inappropriate," Mr. Nutting said. "It's not happening."
Among the numbers Mr. Nutting and Mr. Coonelly attributed to the same audited statements that the Pirates file annually with Major League Baseball and its players' union:
• The Pirates' exact profit -- or net income -- for last season was $5,409,087.
• The profit for 2007 was $15,008,032, and the profit for 2008 was $14,408,249.
• No ownership dividends were paid in that time, and Mr. Nutting took no salary or management fee, but the 2008 books include the $20.4 million distribution made to general ownership. That was approved by four separate votes of the team's six-man board of directors, stretching from late 2008 to mid-2008.
The board of directors at the time was Bob Nutting; his father G. Ogden Nutting, publisher of the Ogden Newspapers chain; brother Bill Nutting, vice president of Ogden Newspapers; Duane Witman, Ogden's chief financial officer; Kevin McClatchy, the previous controlling owner; and Don Beaver, North Carolina businessman. Mr. McClatchy stepped down in 2009.
Bob Nutting and Mr. Coonelly focused most of the Sunday media session on the latter number.
"That's the one that could be most easily misconstrued, and we're here to address it," Mr. Nutting said.
According to Mr. Nutting and Mr. Coonelly, slightly more than half of the distribution, $10,839,000, was paid to the ownership group -- all of the ownership group, including Mr. Nutting -- to cover most of the owners' individual taxes, federal and state, on the team's profits for 2006 and 2007. Mr. Nutting and Mr. Coonelly said there would have been no way to single out any owner or owners for such payments.
First Published August 22, 2010 3:40 pm
