SWINDON Town Football Club's new board of directors has promised that whatever mess its own finances are in, it will pay up the money it owes the borough council.

The new interim board, headed by former Queen's jockey Willie Carson, was elected by shareholders at an extraordinary meeting last week and is thought to have inherited huge debts.

Former Robert Maxwell aid Bob Holt is the director charged with the task of picking through the club's muddled finances.

He says he will not know until the end of the week just how much trouble the club is in, but whatever happens, it will pay back the money it owes the council in rent and business rates arrears.

That amount is now more than £200,000 and is growing month by month. Meanwhile, the football club is thought to be losing around £3.5 million a year.

The rent and rates arrears which are among hundreds of unpaid debts to creditors have been a continual headache for the council and this is not the first time a promise has been made to settle up.

Under the doomed chairmanship of Danny Donegan, the club assured the council in September that the rent debt of £106,000 would be cleared by the end of November.

It sent cheques equalling that amount post-dated to November 30 and promised to keep up with subsequent monthly payments.

It was then revealed that the club also owed £65,000 in business rates, which had not been chased up due to "human error" by staff at the much-troubled WS Atkins, and the council's finance department.

But with the club's accounts frozen ahead of the consortium's board takeover, the council was last month told the cheques would bounce.

Now a meeting has been set up for next Monday at which Mr Holt and the council's finance director, Ian Thompson, will hammer out a new arrangement to settle the debts.

Mr Holt said: "I'm looking forward to the meeting and hope we can sort things out.

"Our accounts are in a hell of a mess and I won't know how bad they are until I meet the CVA (Creditors Voluntary Arrangement) supervisor on Friday.

"I hope to get a handle on things then, but I believe there are a lot of anomalies in the accounts which don't appear to make sense.

"But no matter how much debt we're in, we're going to make a commitment to pay this money back.

"I don't know the details of how we will do that yet, but we will discuss that on Monday."

Council leader Mike Bawden (Con, Old Town and Lawn) said: "Our responsibility is to make sure the outstanding monies are forthcoming.

"We want to set up a good working relationship with this new board and hopefully they'll be in a position to meet their liabilities, but I wouldn't like to pre-judge the meeting."