Sorry to follow-up myself but I remembered where Dick Gaughan's comments on CM's purchase of the Leader/Trailer catalogue were made. (DejaNews/Remarq users who want to see this in context should search uk.music.folk for a thread titled "ethnic flagellation" - and may want to expand their search out from there).

This is what Gaughan says:

When the question of CM purchasing the Leader stuff came up, I was asked for my opinion. Given that the alternative was probably purchase by some institution or other from across the pond my view was that it was vital that it remain somewhere in the UK as it was a vital part of our culture(s) and was an irreplacable archive of a unique period of musical exploration and development; it would have been a tragedy were it to be taken elsewhere. Were I asked the same question by anyone today, I would offer the same view.

As I had, at that time, no real reason for doubting that CM was run by honourable people with reasonable motives, my advice was to buy it and make it available on CD, the complete catalogue. To do anything other made no sense whatever to me and the subsequent witholding left me a bit stunned, to be euphimistic, and scratching my head in vain attempts to discover anything remotely resembling logic, of either business or ethical varieties.

The sum of my knowledge regarding the actual content of the purchase was that it comprised the entire Leader and Trailer catalogues which John Zollman had bought, either directly from Bill or from the company Bill had sold it to. (The latter, I suspect.)

To my knowledge (which is probably not complete) it included masters, contracts and existing stock, mainly vinyl - hence, I presume, the obsession with vinyl sales.

G.