SWINDON Town chairman Sir William Patey has revealed the club could bring in new faces on loan as soon as this weekend, after announcing the Robins have emerged from embargo.

Majority shareholder Andrew Black has pumped in the equity necessary to drop Town’s projected expenditure back below the 65 per cent of turnover limit imposed by Football League rules and the authorities yesterday lifted the ban on the club drafting reinforcements in their battle for a League One play-off place.

That means manager Paolo Di Canio is free to start scouring the loan market and, with the Swindon boss having already identified his targets, Patey suggested that transfer news could be coming out of the County Ground before the trip to Walsall on Saturday.

“We heard from the Football League. A new injection of money came into the club.

“The owner Andrew Black injected enough money into the club to get us out of the current embargo with a little bit of head-room for bringing in new players on loan.

“It’s not a huge amount, we’re basically spending the whole budget that we had set for the year of £4.5million now instead of waiting until January because we’d already overspent it – hence we got into embargo.

“There are limited funds and I have said that Paolo has to decide how he wants to spend that, who he wants to bring in. He talked about a striker, he talked about a midfielder, he talked about the defence – here’s the money you’ve got, do with it what you can.

“We’ve been working at this. I inherited an embargo and it was quite clear that we wanted to get the club out of embargo, we want to get the club on a sound financial footing, we want proper budgeting in place and that’ s what we’re doing.

“This is the first step. We’ve got to build from here and I think the more that we can show that we’re using the resources available wisely the more likely the owners are to say it is money well spent.

“It could be by the weekend, it depends on how quickly the due diligence can be done. We’ve got to do medicals and make sure all the financials are in place. We don’t want to make the mistakes of the past where people came in willy nilly and the odd medical problem arrives afterwards or didn’t quite understand the full contractual commitments.

“We have to make sure we get these things properly done.”

Meanwhile, Patey dismissed reports linking Di Canio with the not-yet-vacant managerial position at Southampton.

“It’s all speculation,” he said. “We have not had any approaches and Paolo is contracted to us for the next two years. He’s got a mandate to take us up the Championship.”