ECF Vacancies

[Roger de Coverly]

If Council supports the idea of the ECF applying for charitable status, International Chess will move to a separate, non-charitable organisation. Responsibility for FIDE rating would stay with the national federation,

For unknown reasons, the ECF website chooses today to highlight an article in the BCM of six months ago. http://www.britishchessmagazine.co.uk/?p=3450

This says on charitable status

To minimise the burden on the members, I am working on a radical reorganisation which will see the ECF relinquish its responsibilities for amateur chess, including junior development, to a new charity. International chess and the British Championships would stay within the ECF

which is almost the exact opposite of what now may be proposed.

[John Upham]

For unknown reasons,

They are not unknown to everyone: never assume!

[Mike Gunn]

The basic idea/ principle (2 organisations, one a charity) hasn't changed. All that has changed is the names of the organisations and how we get to there from where we are now.

[E Michael White]

If Council supports the idea of the ECF applying for charitable status, International Chess will move to a separate, non-charitable organisation. Responsibility for FIDE rating would stay with the national federation,

For unknown reasons, the ECF website chooses today to highlight an article in the BCM of six months ago. http://www.britishchessmagazine.co.uk/?p=3450
This says on charitable status

To minimise the burden on the members, I am working on a radical reorganisation which will see the ECF relinquish its responsibilities for amateur chess, including junior development, to a new charity. International chess and the British Championships would stay within the ECF

which is almost the exact opposite of what now may be proposed.

Roger
Andrew Farthing may have realised that the British Championship can be run as an allowable event within the charity bit. Isn’t that the way the London Classic is organised through Chess in Schools ?

The ECF also needs to set up a charitable umbrella. I believe the New Zealand Chess federation have jumped through the appropriate hoops with similar legislation.

[Mike Gunn]

The bits whic are non-charitable are payments (including prizes) to chess professionals for competing in the British Championships and international teams, hence those bits go into the non-charitable bit.

I don't know how the Classic/ CSC are set up but this will be different because those who win prizes/ receive payments will not be members of the charity.

[Roger de Coverly]

Andrew Farthing may have realised that the British Championship can be run as an allowable event within the charity bit. Isn’t that the way the London Classic is organised through Chess in Schools ?

That may well be the case. It resolves one issue, but leaves the other. If the ECF becomes a charity and remains the FIDE affiliate, how does it handle the issue that the invitation to compete in international team events is in the name of the ECF? If you pay the international team through a subsidiary or an affiliated organisation, does this evade the restriction on using charitable status for professional "sport"?

[Roger de Coverly]

I don't know how the Classic/ CSC are set up but this will be different because those who win prizes/ receive payments will not be members of the charity.

I think it would be worth finding out. I don't suppose Anand etc. were members of CSC either. Perhaps you meant that those winning prizes at the British would be members of the ECF.

There was a lot of promotion of the CSC at the London Chess Classic. It would only be those privy to the financial side of that event that would know whether the involvement with the charity had a side effect of gaining tax concessions for the rest of the tournaments.

If you can do it without running into collateral problems, independence of the British Championships from the ECF should give a VAT saving by virtue of the turnover being below the threshold.

[Roger de Coverly]

The basic idea/ principle (2 organisations, one a charity) hasn't changed. All that has changed is the names of the organisations and how we get to there from where we are now.

The original idea seemed to be that of two parallel organisations. It doesn't seem to be that any more as the "professional" ECF now seems quite clearly subservient to the charity. Last August the proposal appeared to be that the "professional" ECF was the FIDE affiliate, whilst it's now proposed that it would be the charity who was the affiliate. It follows that if you adopt that model, then the charity has to retain many of the "international" elements of the ECF, including almost all the work of the IRO. So you retain an international director, one of whose roles is to liaise with the professional affiliate or subsidiary.

Returning to the job spec for IRO, it's all very well the ECF promoting the international rating of an increasing number of events, including rapid-play and blitz, but it does have the side effect of increasing the workload for any prospective IRO, some of which is parallel to work already done by the central ECF grading team. When Hastings, a while back, failed to submit its results for ECF grading in a timely manner, I thought I got the reply that the ECF grading system could accept results in a FIDE format. Perhaps it's only that tournament software can export data in both formats.

[Andrew Farthing]

There will be a full paper on applying for Charitable Status published with the rest of the Finance Council papers on Wednesday (21 March). I won't attempt to replicate it here.

As Mike Gunn has rightly pointed out, the names of the charity and non-charity have switched since the BCM article, i.e. the ECF will apply for charitable status (if Council is supportive) and cover amateur chess; a new non-charitable limited company will be established to cover the professional side.

It is correct that some of the British Championship events could be classified under amateur chess and operated by the charity, but it makes sense for other reasons to move responsibility for the entire event to the new body. The Council paper will explain why.

[Roger de Coverly]

As Mike Gunn has rightly pointed out, the names of the charity and non-charity have switched since the BCM article, i.e. the ECF will apply for charitable status (if Council is supportive) and cover amateur chess; a new non-charitable limited company will be established to cover the professional side.

It goes beyond just the names. It was touted as a possibility that the charity could have been established with an OMOV compatible structure. On the face of it, using the existing ECF as the vehicle would require Council to either reform or abolish itself, or permanently remove all possibilities of removing or reducing the influence of chess institutions on the decision making process.

Perhaps we should wait for the paper, but I would hope that it will address the question of how an organisation which only runs the British Championships and remunerates players for taking part in international team events will be financed. If it's got sponsorship in its own right, that doesn't present a problem. What happens though, as we have often seen, when it has to go to the now charitable ECF for funding? Obviously, implied consent of entrants permitting, you can finance the international team out of profits from the British, but that fails, as with Liverpool 2008, when the British itself runs at a loss.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Perhaps we should wait for the paper, but I would hope that it will address the question of how an organisation which only runs the British Championships and remunerates players for taking part in international team events will be financed.

That could be easy: the two organizations could collect membership fees independently; since inclusion in the rating lists seems the only way to convince players to join the ECF, you could have one organization enforcing membership in order for the player to appear on the ECF grading list and the other enforcing membership in order for the player to appear on the FIDE list.

[Roger de Coverly]

That could be easy: the two organizations could collect membership fees independently; since inclusion in the rating lists seems the only way to convince players to join the ECF, you could have one organization enforcing membership in order for the player to appear on the ECF grading list and the other enforcing membership in order for the player to appear on the FIDE list.

I wouldn't be so sure. It is proposed that the charity ECF retains the FIDE affiliation and thus maintains the ECF's fiction that individual membership should be a pre-requisite of international rating. There seems no good reason for amateur players or organisations to join or contribute money to the "professional" organisation. The original outline from last year proposed that a new charity would be set up to handle amateur chess and that the existing ECF would become the professional body with presumably a retention of the FIDE affiliation. That would at least give the "professional" organisation a source of income from rating fees and other charges on players wanting to play international events.

[Sean Hewitt]

Now that the deadline for applications for the position of IRO has passed, any guess as to when we might see the white smoke?

[James Courtenay]

I once considered applying... then I remembered that I'd have to deal with chess organisers. Funnily enough the shampoo and shower looked rather more attractive after that. For the third time in as many hours.

[Matthew Turner]

It looks as if nobody applied for the IRO job; The deadline for applications has now been removed from the ECF posting.