The future of the Lismore’s Australian-Italo Club hangs on the outcome of a board meeting at Club Marconi in Sydney tonight.

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The local Italo club has been in financial difficulty and looked set to close earlier this year – until Club Marconi chief executive, Tony Zappia expressed interest in amalgamating with the Lismore-based club a few weeks ago.

Read more: Lismore's Italo Club could be saved from closure

Italo club president Americo Melchoir said the Club Marconi board had been up to visit “and they are all happy”.

“We’ve sent down all the paperwork,” Americo said. “Now our future depends on the board agreeing to take us on.

“If they agree to the amalgamation tonight, we are ¾ of the way there to saving the club.”

Americo said the next step if the board approved would be for Club Marconi’s members to also agree at another club meeting.

“They will let me know and then I will call a meeting in three weeks so our board and members can formally accept the amalgamation, then there’s a three week legal process to go through,” he said. “So, it will be about six weeks away until we get the green light.

Americo said he had been speaking to Mr Zappia and that Mr Zappia had told him that the Sydney club’s 45,000 members had a good turn out to meetings and passing the amalgamation “shouldn’t be a problem”.

Americo said he was confident the merger would go ahead and looked forward to Club Marconi spending potentially a million dollars to redevelopment the Italo Club.

“Club Marconi could build a coffee shop, and a hairdresser here and turn the Italo Club into a centre,” he said

Italo Club to reopen soon

“We actually wanted to open the Italo Club a couple of weeks ago, but them we got scared because of the virus again and decided to wait,” Americo said.

“We will try and open in a couple of weeks, but it costs money to open and if the pubs have to close again, we will lose money.

“If we buy $4000 worth of beer we would lose it because beer only has a shelf life of about a month.”

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