AN EXTRAORDINARY general meeting looms at Tigerland after the Richmond board rejected a proposal from the Focus on Footy group following a meeting on Tuesday.
Richmond president Peggy O'Neal and chief executive Brendon Gale met with prospective board challengers Martin Hiscock and Mag Kearney from Focus on Footy, and their public relations consultant Richard Amos, at a Melbourne law firm on Tuesday morning.
At the meeting, the rebel group asked that four or five current Richmond board members step aside, to be replaced by Focus on Footy representatives of the challengers' choosing.
After the Richmond board's scheduled meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the club released a statement rejecting the proposal in its entirety.
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"Our members are perfectly entitled to run for the board and we have processes in place to allow them to do just that," O'Neal said.
"We encourage any of our 70,000 members wishing to do so to engage in our nominations process or through our normal electoral process as part of the Annual General Meeting."
It is understood that Focus on Footy does have the numbers to trigger an EGM but the rebel group planned to wait for a response from the club before taking further action.
Focus on Footy launched its campaign on September 5 and have kept the threat of an EGM alive if they are unable to gain seats on the board in an orderly handover.
Under Richmond's constitution they would require just 100 member signatures to trigger an EGM.
Earlier on Tuesday, rebel leader Hiscock said the meeting was an "olive branch, not a concession" to the club, which needed to change.
"We believe this starts with changing the board. Many of the current board members have been there for too long," he said.
"We have to do something. We don’t want to wake up in 15 years time and say we should have done something before it became half a century since our last premiership."