MICHAEL Wilde has revealed his biggest regret since getting involved at Saints – and it’s not staging a sensational U-turn to bring Rupert Lowe back to power.

Instead, he believes his one major mistake was not appointing himself as executive chairman of the Southampton Leisure Holdings PLC board in 2006.

Wilde now regrets taking advice from financial services company Vantis PLC ahead of replacing Rupert Lowe and his board in June of that year.

The Jersey-based businessman had three options open to him after hoovering up a huge amount of shares to become SLH’s largest individual shareholder.

l Paul Thompson, one of the Lowe board directors who sold him shares, had offered to oversee the day-to-day running of the business as temporary chief executive.

l Wilde could have installed himself as the PLC executive chairman – after all, he had orchestrated the change in board personnel.

l His third option was to take the advice of Vantis, among whose non-executive directors were Ken Dulieu.

“As entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial clients, Vantis is constantly finding new ways to solve business issues,” the company states. “We work with like-minded people who challenge the process and make a difference.”

Wilde certainly DID challenge the process at Saints where Lowe had been chairman of the PLC since 1997.

And he DID eventually make a difference, though not in the way he anticipated.

The Portugal-based Dulieu subsequently became SLH’s chairman, a non-executive role to start with but one which was later controversially upgraded to executive status.

Vantis also put Wilde in contact with Jim Hone and Lee Hoos, who became his chief executive and operations manager respectively at St Mary’s.

Ticked boxes Hone and Hoos had worked together at Fulham, while Hone had also worked for Glasgow Celtic.

On the face of it, the PLC board and football board Wilde pieced together ticked lots of boxes.

The executive directors had recent experience of working at high level professional clubs, while successful businessmen and Saints fans – Wilde, Leon Crouch and Patrick Trant – were non-executive directors.

Club legend Lawrie McMenemy was given a football board directorship as was Mary Corbett, whose late father John rescued the club from oblivion back in the 1930s.

But the regime started to disintegrate within months – mainly due to a lack of new investment that had publicly been hinted at.

Wilde told the Daily Echo this week: “My periods as chairman have always been in a non-executive role and only as part of the board.

“People think the chairman makes the day to day decisions but that’s not correct.

“Both my spells have been in non-executive roles and we’ve had executives running the business.

“The one thing I have learnt is if I was chairman of a football club I would have to have an executive role to implement the vision and ideas and not run it through executives or consensus. That’s my biggest single regret – the first time I removed Rupert I didn’t put myself in as executive chairman of the PLC.

“I didn’t have experience of it and thought I’d learn, but in hindsight I should have taken a bit more control of the day to day decision making.

“I’ve never had the ability to implement what I wanted for the club in terms of my own vision, just supporting others.

“I hoped one day I would have that ability but it’s proved not to be.

“I came in as a supporter with the money to effect change and relied on the advisors (Vantis) who were experts in the industry.

“People say my appointments to the club did this or that but I took advice from specialists.

“If I did anything wrong it was taking advice from specialists.

“I was only there six months. I can’t be held responsible for how they were controlled when I wasn’t there.

“When I left we were fourth in the table but we had a hostile board by that point. Jim Hone was not the evil man portrayed but was in a difficult position. I wasn’t involved in most of that.

“I hired people who were recommended and had a track record.

“Maybe the board didn’t make the best of those executives when it had them.”

In typical Saints fashion with regards to the last six years, the feelgood factor the Wilde regime quickly introduced was a false dawn.

It ended for Wilde with the farcical situation of him being voted off the board he had put together by the executive directors he had appointed!

Apart from not giving himself an executive role, Wilde also made another crucial mistake with regards to board composition.

His PLC board started with three executive directors – Hone, Hoos and finance director David Jones – and six non execs. They were Wilde, Crouch, Trant, Paul Thompson, Brian Hunt and Keith Wiseman.

No replacements Thompson resigned his non executive role at the AGM in November 2006, but no replacement was put forward.

When Wilde was voted off the board the following February, there were by now four execs – Dulieu’s role had been ‘upgraded’ – and four non execs.

That gave Dulieu the casting vote if the execs and the non execs all voted in their blocks.

The situation was worsened when Hunt stepped down and commercial director Andy Oldknow was promoted to executive director status.

That left the execs with a 5-3 majority over the non execs, compared to the 6-3 non execs majority a few months earlier.

Lowe’s former board supporter Mike Richards has said “not even the most naive of businessmen should have allowed this to happen.”

With the execs almost always voting together, within months they had full control over the non execs.

That was only halted when the SISU deal failed to progress and Crouch entered into a deal to pay off Hone, Dulieu, Oldknow and Hoos in December 2007.

That cost the club about £600,000, with Hoos getting a payment even though he stayed at St Mary’s until last May and then joined Leicester City as chief executive within weeks.