Gillingham’s new owner Brad Galinson is keen to keep Paul Scally involved with the club as an asset to ‘push the club forward’.

Mr Scally has sold his majority shares in the club to American businessman Galinson but retains a minority holding in the business. The two sat watching the Gills game at Stevenage on Monday and have formed a working relationship.

Speaking to the Gills media on Tuesday, Mr Galinson said: “Part of this due diligence process is I’ve gotten to know Paul very well, he remains a minority shareholder and a board member.

“Our thought is that someone with his wisdom and his experience and his dedication to the club is only an asset to push us forward so the idea is to use his strengths and his participation and rely on his experience to continue the club moving forward as partners.”

Mr Galinson has now been confirmed by the club as their new chairman, as well as majority shareholder. Mr Scally, who has been owner of the club since 1995, stepped back from his role in the summer, bringing in Paul Fisher as co-chairman.

Mr Fisher will also be staying on, confirmed the new Gills chief.

“He will absolutely be staying with the club,” Mr Galinson said. “He’s an essential part of the operations of the club and he will be remaining to run the operations of the club gladly.”

Mr Galinson made no comment on the management situation, with boss Neil Harris under scrutiny from fans after a poor first half of the season, which sees the club sitting bottom of League 2.

Harris hopes to have the opportunity to change things this month during the January transfer window. He’s already signed Tom Nichols from Crawley and is hoping for several more faces in the squad before their next league game on January 14.

“The plan is to strengthen the squad,” the new chairman confirmed. “As far as numbers, it is hard to promise something, but January is a crucial time, it is by far the highest priory for the club, for the staff and the manager for everybody, the plan is to upgrade and become more competitive

“Short-term nobody will be surprised (that the priority) is upgrading the club, we need a tune-up, the players need help and January is the time to do that, the short term for sure is to give help to the team to move up the table.

“As far as the medium and long term, there is a lot of exciting things to do once you have accomplished that. The whole business is around the pitch so of course you have to be strong on the pitch and then as I said there is a real diversified businesses around Gillingham.

“The Factory (bar), the Great Hall (events centre), the GFC School, all of those things need money and need help to grow because it builds one giant sustainable business, not just for the club and the fans but also the whole community, they do a lot of important things here. The idea is to expand it and keep it more sustainable and grow it.”

Mr Galinson said he spent a year in England looking for a club to invest in before targetting Gillingham in the summer.

He said: “Gillingham combined a lot of the things that we were looking for, it is a terrific catchment area, right outside London, the only EFL club in Kent, huge fan base, huge corporate sponsors base, a nice sized stadium and a lot of raw potential.

"Gillingham also has diversified businesses around the pitch and so that helps to build a sustainable team and those were the things we were looking for and Gillingham had most, if not all of those.

“My interactions with Gillingham was late summer, early fall, I got to meet a lot of key people in the organisation, and we actually had a very long due diligence both ways for them to get to know us and us to get to know them.

“It has to be a partnership long term to build a sustainable business and so part of the reason it takes so long is because you are literally getting to know people, relationships and trust, and know their strengths and their weaknesses and so it is a very long process, but it’s a very important process to go through.”

Mr Galinson has said he will be on the pitch this Saturday with his family ahead of the club’s FA Cup game against Leicester City. He added: “I am very excited to do that and then we will enjoy the game. It should very exciting.”