A MYSTERY benefactor has emerged at the last minute to save Bury Football Club from extinction with a bid to buy their stadium.

Shakers' £1.3million debt to the Russell Cooke Trust looks set to be cleared just a fortnight before their May 31 deadline, after an anonymous local businessman offered to buy their Gigg Lane stadium for £500,000 and lease it back to the club at a favourable rate.

The offer has allowed Bury to finally hand a deal to creditors which will wipe out their massive debt and give them a clean slate for next season.

Under the proposal tabled by club administrators, The Save Our Shakers Trust will buy former chairman Hugh Eaves' shares for £1 to take control of the club, then use the thousands of pounds raised by supporters in recent months to start paying off the club's minor creditors.

The only stumbling block is that the stadium bid is still some £800,000 short of the mortgage repayment being demanded but joint administrator Matthew Dunham was confident the Creditors' Voluntary Arrangement would be agreed in time to save Bury from liquidation.

"Nobody's signed anything yet but I think we are nearly in aggreement, in principle, with all of the creditors," he said.

"There's not so much distance between us that it can't be breached. Nothing has been agreed but we believe we can persuade the creditors that it's in their and our interest to agree on this deal."

It has been a long hard slog for everyone involved with the club since it went into administration more than two months ago, with a spate of court appearances and legal spadework from Dunham and co matched by a furious fundraising effort by the club.

And Dunham admitted they were approaching the end of a very long, dark tunnel and into a bright future.

"We are coming towards the end of it now and the CVA is just a mechanism to get the company out of insolvency," he said.

"We've still got a long way to go because there are still the financial difficulties caused by the ITV Digital crisis and the general uncertainty in football. Players that were worth £500,000 a year ago aren't worth anything near that now because clubs just don't have the money.

"So it's still going to be very tight and it is very important that the fans continue to show the tremendous support they have in recent weeks but the cash flow forecasts we have seen indicate that the club can survive and go forward."