Rangers and the Kaleidoscope Of Doom
There’s a famous scene in the first Indiana Jones film where our hero, faced with a swordsman performing an elaborate duelling ritual prior to an anticipated bout of formal combat, simply pulls out a gun and wearily shoots him. (Inspired, no doubt, by the legend of the Gordian Knot.) We’re feeling a bit like that this morning as we peer into the bewildering, constantly-shifting looking-glass that is the affairs of Rangers FC.
Either of yesterday’s events would have been enough to try to untangle by itself, but the two smashed head-on into each other and created a grisly heap of tortured, twisted, smoking metal that’d take half a Scottish fire brigade all day to separate into identifiable components, and with about the same chance of anyone walking away intact. But we’re so stupid we’re going to have a go by ourselves. Read on, if you dare.
Firstly, the CVA. More details slowly emerged throughout the course of the day, and as is now traditional in the kooky cartoon world of Duff & Phelps, they made things less, rather than more, clear. The Scotsman carries a transcript of a press conference with the administrators, and some of the answers in it are startling.
Q: Is the £8.5m from Charles Green’s Sevco consortium a loan rather than an investment?
A: At this moment in time, it could be interpreted that way.
We almost boggled our eyes clean out of their sockets at this one. The qualifiers are entirely unnecessary and misleading – the money proposed by Green’s consortium quite simply IS a loan, due to be paid back with interest by 2020. That much is unequivocally and unambiguously written down in the CVA proposal document, so D&P trying to muddy the waters is as pointless as it is inexplicable.
The next one is the one that really put us in a spin, though.
Q: If you have to go down the Newco route, is the £5.5m deal Charles Green has in that event exclusive, or can others enter the bidding at that point?
A: I think we’ve been through a sufficiently extensive bidding process and, because we were running out of funding, we didn’t feel we could have an option of going back out to the market. Green’s bid was better than all other offers on both CVA and Newco basis. So we’ve structured it so that the CVA is the preferred option. We hope that is concluded on 14 June but, if that doesn’t happen, Green has to force us – and we have to force him – to go the Newco route for £5.5 million. But it is envisaged that the CVA will be successful. If it’s not, there is no option for anyone else to come back in.
(Our emphasis.)
This is simply staggering. If the CVA fails, Green’s £5.5m newco bid will guarantee a zero return for the creditors, because every penny will be swallowed up by Duff & Phelps’ fees, which have been variously described in the media but seem by broad consensus to be around £5m so far, and still accumulating.
But the administrators’ prime legal duty, let’s remember, is to secure the best possible return for the creditors, not for Rangers. It’s their job to produce as much money from the wreckage as it can, not to prioritise the survival of Rangers as a football club. While there are many reasons why a fire-sale of Rangers’ assets wouldn’t deliver the sort of sums onlookers might expect[1], there’s unquestionably a significant possibility it could realise more than the measly sum Green is offering.
(Which is itself conditional on the club receiving a guarantee from the SFA and SPL that it will be allowed to continue playing in the top flight of Scottish football – an outcome that looks less and less likely, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Technically, the administrators’ reply means that Rangers could end up being bought by nobody at all – if the CVA fails and the SFA guarantee doesn’t materialise, Green is out and D&P have just told us there’s “no option for anyone else to come back in”. That, of course, is plainly NOT the situation – in such an event there would HAVE to be a fire sale, Ibrox couldn’t just be left standing there empty – so it’s hard to conclude anything other than that Duff & Phelps are openly and obviously lying.
Some would suggest that it’s not for the first time. The press are optimistically reporting that the CVA proposal at present offers creditors a likely payment of 8p to 9p in the pound, based on the figures we laid out yesterday but supplemented by £2m in income from transfer fees owed to Rangers (largely, we think, from the sale of Nikica Jelavic to Everton). But there’s another spanner in the financial works, in the form of a whopping £3.6m “administration trading shortfall“, in other words the money the club has continued to lose while it’s been in Duff and Phelps’ hands since mid-February.
The administrators, so far as we can establish, appear to be trying to pull something of a fast one in regard to this hefty chunk of debt, by adding it to the unsecured-creditors list. But – and again, we have to point out that we’re not a lawyer – as far as we can establish companies simply aren’t allowed to be run at a loss in administration. (That being the point of entering administration in the first place.)
Any debts run up during such a period have to be paid in full when the company exits administration, not at a pence-in-the-pound rate from the creditors’ pot. Once again, such a situation would obliterate most if not all of the pot, leaving creditors with zero.
So to cut a long story at least a little bit shorter, it looks like the reality of the “CVA proposal” is that creditors are being asked to blindly accept a pig-in-a-poke deal in advance, based on a document full of unknown or misleading figures, which is almost certain to result in them waiting for months only to then receive nothing at all, or perhaps 1p in the £ at best.
Last night’s TV was full of “experts” asserting that they would do so anyway on the grounds that something is still better than nothing, but such a view is naive to the point of stupidity. The rules of administration are such that only two creditors ultimately matter with regard to the CVA – Ticketus and HMRC. Nobody has a clue what’s going through Ticketus’ mind, so we’ll leave them out for now and focus on HMRC.
HMRC has a much wider field of interest than any other creditor, because the others are concerned solely with the money owed to them by Rangers. HMRC, though, have an entire country full of football clubs and other businesses to consider. Many other clubs are facing similar actual or potential investigations to that of the Rangers “Big Tax Case”. If HMRC are seen to let Rangers off lightly, they’ll be opening the floodgates to every other football club in the land to spend money it doesn’t have, avoid tax, and then just collapse and re-emerge unscathed as a newco when the bills come home to roost.
The Rangers case, then, is absolutely vital to HMRC not as a source of revenue but as a warning to others. The money that would be lost by the Revenue if such an approach were to become widespread dwarfs that owed to it by Rangers.
(In HMRC’s world, the level of tax evasion by Rangers is in fact relatively small – most of the money stacked up in Rangers’ red column is in the form of fines, penalties and interest rather than actual unpaid tax and NI contributions.)
The idea, then, that the Revenue would accept a piddling likely return of as little as £1m-2m (roughly what one of its departments spends on biscuits in a year) on behalf of the taxpayer, rather than forcing Rangers into liquidation pour encourager les autres, and thereby ensuring scores of millions in future tax receipts from hundreds of other football clubs and companies, is – not to put too fine a point on it – sheer delusional fantasy of the most extreme (Orange) order.
The CVA will fail – as all sane commentators have always said it will, and as many people believe it is deliberately designed to. You can quote us on that. Then what?
That brings us neatly and reasonably swiftly to the second aspect of what appears to be the collective death wish of Rangers FC – the appeal to the Court of Session over the transfer embargo. Mindbogglingly, the club appears to be maintaining the position that it thinks it’ll emerge unscathed over the flagrant breaching of both SFA[2] and FIFA[3] rules by taking its case to a civil law court rather than the appropriate sporting authorities. The Herald today reports, for example, that:
“Rangers are optimistic that FIFA will not regard their dispute with the SFA as significantly serious because the club argued only that the sanction of a one-year signing ban was not available to the SFA Judicial Panel which imposed it, not that there should be no punishment.”
This is a spectacularly wishful misinterpretation of the facts. FIFA’s wrath is incurred when a club goes to a civil law court at all, not because of the specifics of individual cases. The organisation is unfailingly infuriated by any attempt to park the tanks of another lawmaking body on its lawn, and it has already stated that it expects the SFA to take “direct action“ against Rangers over the breach.
The SFA therefore has no option but to impose a second separate punishment on Rangers for involving the CoS, on top of a revised punishment for the original offence of bringing the game into disrepute which was the cause of the transfer embargo in the first place. As has already been exhaustively discussed in the media since yesterday, the revised punishment can only be some sort of suspension from SFA competitions, or complete expulsion – a fine has already been deemed inadequate for the seriousness of the offences, and Rangers don’t have any money anyway.
(Also, the SFA will be extremely annoyed that the original fine has just been effectively slashed by the court’s awarding of costs for yesterday’s hearing to Rangers.)
The same applies to the additional punishment that will be required to have a hope of placating FIFA. The absolute least the SFA can impose in either case is a one-season suspension from the Scottish Cup, but that has almost no chance of being seen as sufficient, since it could amount to as little as a one-match ban. (Given that any surviving Rangers will be a greatly weakened side which could easily be dumped out of the Cup at the first time of asking anyway.)
It simply isn’t plausible to see the SFA, however desperately it wants to keep Rangers alive, being able to do less than suspend the club’s membership for at least one full season – it could probably ride out the public fury in Scotland that would accompany a lesser sanction based solely on the Cup, but it’s highly unlikely it would be enough to satisfy FIFA, about whose opinion the SFA is obliged to care a great deal more.
Of course, any suspension completely scuppers both the CVA and Green’s formation of a Newco Rangers. (Remember, both are conditional on Rangers staying in the top division without interruption.) And with the latter having been seen as Green’s (covertly) desired route to making a profit on his investment, the challenge at the Court of Session makes even less sense.
Because the strangest thing of all about the CoS appeal is that the transfer embargo was essentially meaningless for Rangers. In their first post-CVA (or post-liquidation) season, they’d have had no money to pay transfer fees or salaries for star players, and no European football to attract them with. They’d have had to put out a team full of raw youngsters (and whichever journeymen from the current playing staff hadn’t been able to find alternative employment) no matter what, so the embargo in reality cost them nothing. It was the outcome of a very carefully-considered attempt by the SFA to look tough and decisive without actually damaging Rangers in any substantial way.
Going to the CoS all but guaranteed the club would be subject to far more serious sanctions, from either the SFA or FIFA or both. Why it did so anyway will be one of the lasting questions from the entire saga – was it sheer petulance over the original punishment, a deliberate attempt to bring the rest of Scottish football down with it, or some sort of cunning masterplan that nobody’s been clever enough to spot yet?
The only clues to be found in today’s media suggest the former. Andy Kerr of the Rangers Supporters Assembly, for example, reacted – as reported in the Herald – to the CoS judgement with the following words:
“The SFA might be feeling a bit sore, particularly as it has to pay the legal costs, but you would think the attitude of a governing body should be ‘How do we best help a member club to continue to play?'”
The sheer magnitude of the denial and arrogance contained in that sentence is hard to comprehend. Kerr, on behalf of Rangers fans, appears to be both demanding and expecting “help” from a governing body that has just had a coach and horses driven through its rules, with potentially dire consequences for the entire Association and all its members, by a club it was already bending over backwards to accommodate by imposing essentially harmless penalties for extremely grave offences.
On the other hand, the previous public utterances of senior spokesmen within the club seem to support the second conclusion – that Rangers are already resigned to inescapable oblivion, but want to take the rest of Scottish football with them. It doesn’t take a wild leap to imagine that Rangers fans, and some of the club’s officials, would glean considerable comfort in their own destruction if they also knew that by enraging FIFA along the way they were ensuring other teams (but mostly Celtic) would be deprived of the benefits of European competition for years.
As for option 3, only time will tell.
…
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] Many people have been wondering why Ibrox, which is notionally valued in Rangers’ books at over £100m, can’t simply be sold to pay off their debts. The problem there is that that valuation is basically an insurance one, representing the cost to Rangers FC of rebuilding Ibrox if it were to be destroyed in some sort of catastrophe. (To be honest, we’re a little surprised Craig Whyte didn’t torch it before now.)
But in a fire-sale the value of the assets is limited to whatever the new owner can realise from them. Unless they’re prepared to run a football club themselves, all they’ve got is a patch of grass surrounded by useless seating.
The main stand is a listed building and can’t be knocked down, but in theory the site could be redeveloped in much the same way Arsenal’s old stadium at Highbury has been. The issue with that, however, is that Ibrox is in a run-down and deprived area of Glasgow (take a wander round in Google Street View and see for yourself), not a highly desirable location in the middle of London, so the returns on such an investment might be somewhat uncertain, to put it kindly.
(Though it could be argued – cruelly, but not unreasonably – that the dissolution of Rangers would in and of itself make the area much more attractive.)
Also, as far as we understand it, Murray Park has planning permission for football-related use only, so you couldn’t bulldoze it and build houses or a Tesco, which clearly reduces its potential value drastically.
If the club is liquidated the players become free agents (though this, like a great many other things, is a matter of some dispute), so there are no quick bucks to be made there either. Basically, Rangers’ assets are worth a lot less if you want to do anything other than running a football club with them, so it’d be very much a buyer’s market.
[2] SFA Handbook, Article 65.5:
“The fact of membership of the Scottish FA shall constitute an agreement by a member that it, or any body or person interested through such member, shall submit all disputes to the jurisdiction of the Judicial Panel and shall not be permitted to take such differences or questions to a court of law.”
[3] FIFA Statutes, Article 64, part 3:
“The Associations shall insert a clause in their statutes or regulations, stipulating that it is prohibited to take disputes in the Association or disputes affecting Leagues, members of Leagues, clubs, members of clubs, Players, Officials and other Association Officials to ordinary courts of law, unless the FIFA regulations or binding legal provisions specifically provide for or stipulate recourse to ordinary courts of law.”
Association rules or not, just because you and I agree beforehand that we won’t go to court that does not actually deny you or I access to the law in the event of a dispute.
The rules are there to stop internal dissent getting out of hand however they cannot block any legal action and potentially open up a bigger legal case…
I have read that in fact Spielberg had choreographed an elaborate sword fight at that point, but Ford repeatedly fouled-up the initial moves. Finally, in annoyance, he just pulled his gun and shot the other guy. It was a wrap.
Now shut the heck up about bloody Rangers and get back to the politics, boy!
“The rules are there to stop internal dissent getting out of hand however they cannot block any legal action and potentially open up a bigger legal case”
The SFA are entitled to impose any rules they like on membership, so long as they don’t conflict with the law, eg on racist, sexist or sectarian grounds. There is no “human right” to be a member of the SFA – Rangers can go off and form their own football association if they don’t like it.
In purely practical terms, Rangers can’t afford a case that drags through the courts for years anyway.
Oh yes, and what is “CVA” other than “cardiovascular accident”?
No, don’t answer that, officially don’t care and anyway it sounds like the same sort of thing. Sudden and often fatal.
if they can impose any rules they like then how did they lose the case yesterday. That’s the whole point of the argument.
I’m pretty sure the whole thing will blow over and be overshadowed by the actual issue at hand which is liquidation.
Kenny, ultimately, its the SFA, UEFA and FIFA’s ball
They decide who can play and what the rules are…
Any other point is merely a distraction
“if they can impose any rules they like then how did they lose the case yesterday”
Because the court found that the sanction they imposed WASN’T in their rules. That’s kinda the point. The court didn’t say “You can’t impose rules on Rangers”, it said “Go back and impose ones that are written down in your Articles”. The prohibition on going to law courts is there in black and white.
“Now shut the heck up about bloody Rangers and get back to the politics, boy!”
I’m still too hopping mad about that sodding “debate” to write anything considered until at least tomorrow…
I didn’t see it. Lucky me.
Close the lot of them down as they are gangster run to their core, and implement a shinty/curling seasonal programme. Lord God in Govan, the whole shebang of them are a knuckle dragging weight on the rest of us (the Jags ecluded).
I am really finding it hard to understand all the vitriol from Rangers fans towards the SFA, and the rejoicing that is going on at yesterday’s decision. I have read numerous tweets from Rangers supporters, vilifying the SFA for hitting them with a punishment that they deem “illegal”, and I can’t help asking WHAT punishment do they think was correct?
Now, maybe it’s just me but I think the SFA tried to do Rangers a favour (albeit in context of the situation), and I can’t believe that the Rangers fans can’t see that. Yes, the SFA had a list of sanctions in their ‘rule book’, and it could be argued that they should have used one of them instead of the transfer embargo. However, as the SFA stated at the time of the investigation, due to the seriousness of the ‘crimes’, they could have expelled or suspended Rangers completely. In the end, they decided not to go this far, as they took into account that this would probably kill the club altogether. However, this left the SFA in a difficult position as the other options in the rule book were far too lenient, considering the gravity of the misdemeanours. Rightly or wrongly, the SFA imposed a ‘middle ground’ sanction (the transfer embargo). In a nutshell, this ‘middle ground’ was created to serve Rangers with a severe enough punishment, but not so strict and final as expulsion from the SFA.
So, with all the above in mind, I cannot understand WHY the Rangers Administrators went to court over this. In a way, the SFA bent their rules to actually help Rangers. The SFA are now just going to hit them with one of the OFFICIAL punishments. Probably the one that they were lucky not to get in the first place – Expulsion or Suspension. Did they gamble that the court would rule in their favour AND scrap the punishment altogether? Surely they must have known that if they were successful, there was a good chance the case would be sent back to the appeals panel for a revised punishment?
There have been many arguments over the past few months about who is most to blame for Rangers problems. David Murray? Craig Whyte? The Bank? Well, if they get expelled from the SFA, it looks like Duff & Phelps can add themselves to that list.
LOL, Torn between Aberdeen fans natural dislike for Rangers and your duties as a Nationalist….lesser men have been broken by simpler dilemmas
Au contraire, mon frere. The obliteration of Rangers would be the single biggest blow struck for the nationalist cause in centuries. No dilemma there at all.
😀
This sordid affair has dragged on for FAR too long.
Enough is enough!
Why don’t the SFA just waken smell th coffee and just expel lRangers (didn’t use the apostrophe there REV :D) but for the sanity of everyone else just make DAMNED sure the expulsion is within the rules of your damned rule book!
This pathetic fiasco needs to be ended and int needs to be ended NOW! not in some wishy washy within the next millennium as seems likely the way the whole sordid business is dragging its feet.
On a side issue. Is it just me or does any one else find Duff and Phelps currently alleged bill of around £5 Million for what is effectively 2 Month’s work!just a wee bit astounding. I have no knowledge of the legal or accounting professions but I just find this figure mind boggling! I guess the one saving grace is that they are acting as administrators for a club that doesn’t have too much in the way of bad debts. 😀
Gawd only knows what their fees would be if they were “working” for a club with a huge amount of debts!
The phrase “awarding of costs to Rangers” means that the SFA have to cover all the lawyer fees associated with the CofS case. Rangers will just get the money back that they’ve spent on the civil court case and will break even from the case. It won’t ‘slash’ anything off of the fine that was imposed.
Actually the fine is now zero because the court threw out the fine / player embargo decision as it wasn’t in the SFA handbook of penalties.
I think that’s how it works anyway.
That passage from the SFA handbook that said that individual clubs can’t go to a public court must have been seen by Duff & Phelps so it was obviously a provocative move rather than anything else.
“It won’t ‘slash’ anything off of the fine that was imposed.”
What I meant by that was that the SFA having to pay the court costs would mean they effectively got less money from the fine. I can’t quite be 100% sure, but I think the CoS allowed the fine to stand – as it IS in the SFA’s official list of sanctions – and only threw out the transfer embargo. Could be wrong, though.
Rev..
I see where you’re coming from. Maybe add the costs to any future fine 😉
I wonder if Duff and Phelps should start calling in all these supposed ‘loans’ to help pay the creditors.
That would be interesting and would waste more time. I always thought a loan meant something you borrow and agree to pay back in the future, with interest. Although in the la la land of this situation I might be wrong.
While I understand some people such as Morag are bored to tears with this Rangers saga and wish it would be over so it wouldn’t take up so much media attention I’ve really enjoyed Rev Stu’s blogging on this matter IMO it’s competing with the thoughts on Scot’s law blog for second best coverage of the topic, RTC blog being obvious winner. As for impact on the independence debate on the face of it seeing what amounts to the largest pro Union institution in Scotland dying is hard to spin any other way than good for the Scottish nationalist cause. Also comparing the 2 issues is interesting as it seems to me the RFC issue has inflamed more passion and proved more divisive than the issue of Independence.
P.S yes I accept that there are pro Indy Gers but a club which waves the Union flag and sings God Save the queen and rule Britannia has clearly defined itself as unionist club.
No, inspired from Death Machines (0:10)
Stu,
Be careful what you wish for, if the vote is on a Saturday and the Bears have nowt else to do then it may provide an ‘avalanche’ of No votes, if the belief is that Rangers fans are of course all Unionists :D.
Thats a statement I’d like to hear Isobel Fraser say live on the BBC.
“P.S yes I accept that there are pro Indy Gers but a club which waves the Union flag and sings God Save the queen and rule Britannia has clearly defined itself as unionist club. “
Does that make all Celtic fans really Irish then given their love of ballads from the old country ?………of course it doesn’t.
I understand the sentiment but its a lot more complex than you make out. The Pro Unionist regalia you see has more roots in Irish Unionism and was created as an ‘antidote/backlash/rallying point’ to the Irish influx into Glasgow than it has in modern day Scottish politics. Although admittedly Murray and Smith putting their oar in previously does muddy the waters. the club is over 100 years old. The independence movement wasn’t really an issue then.
Anyway I agree with Morag, Im bored to death with it. Lets just get a verdict and get on with it.
From the Rangers Tax Case blog – (Veracity unknown)
But, if this is true………….
“Well I have been debating all afternoon whether or not I should post this but here goes. My best friend is a solicitor and works for the foreign office and has told me that South Africa have applied for international arrest warrants for Dave King and David Murray. The foreign office have so far rejected all calls for this as the police, HMRC and SOCA are investigating what they say is one of the biggest money laundering schemes Scotland has ever seen and believe they have a case under UK jurisdiction.
South Africa believe that King has laundered up to £100 million through the Murray Group but my pal says as of yet there is no reason to believe any of the money went through Rangers. The money that has went through the Murray group may have bounced of up to 20 ‘dummy’ companies in countries like Barbados, Zimbabwe, Brazil and Scotland and were set up to buy ore metals from each other even though each company had no physical ore deposits. They apparently have rock solid evidence of this that would implicate King, King’s mother and David Murray. They are arguing that the people supposedly in charge of Kings trust are in fact fictional people as so far they have been unable to trace any of the declared trustees.
SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency) have had forensic investigators combing through Murray International holdings accounts for 6 months now and the list of possible money laundering just keeps growing. MURRAY SPORTS LIMITED which IS associated with Rangers have declared assets of under £10,000 yet have received loans of up to £40 million. There is no evidence to suggest this involves Dave King but certainly may indite Murray and apparently (I really have been doubting this) some very high ranking officials with the former Bank Of Scotland. Llyods have handed dossiers over to SOCA and the Police that show historic accounts from BOS handling of Murray Internationals accounts. The dossiers contained documents that BOS and Murray thought had been destroyed but the ‘Carbon Copies’ that were used to copy the hard documents where not destroyed and were digitalised when Llyods took over BOS.
Murray and King have had an injunction put in place to stop media reports on this and an appeal has been lodged by a major news organisation.
As soon as I find out any more I will let you guys know. The guy is my best friend and I have no reason to not believe him as he is very high ranking in his position.”
The content itself if true would be one of the biggest scandals that I can remember…..just gets crazier and crazier.
Sounds like the sort of bollocks that always crops up around this kind of thing, but then one time in a hundred (cf Ryan Giggs) it turns out to be true. I’m filing it with the 99% for now.
Appreciate that Stu 🙂
Hence the (Veracity unknown) caveat
Rev. Stuart Campbell says:
May 30, 2012 at 11:44 am
“Now shut the heck up about bloody Rangers and get back to the politics, boy!”
“I’m still too hopping mad about that sodding “debate” to write anything considered until at least tomorrow…”
.
I think the last thing you should do is shut up about this. There is a paucity of useful analysis on this issue – in fact there is near none – and the contributions you’ve made are significant and valuable – I’ve certainly learned a lot. It would be a mistake to discontinue them. keep ’em coming.
I’m not absolutely convinced I want to know the answer to this but I heard tonight that a club that goes bankrupt will be ” fined” 10 points or 30 points if the powers that be get their way – is that not tantamount to kicking someone when they’re down?and why would anyone want to do that?
“The absolute least the SFA can impose in either case is a one-season suspension from the Scottish Cup, but that has little chance of being seen as sufficient, since it could amount to as little as a one-match ban.”
Yeah, The Herald reports today that Rangers pretty much begged to be given a one-season cup suspension before the transfer ban was imposed, so if the SFA do now resort to kicking them out of the cup (a tainted competition which no self-respecting football fan cares about anyway, what with the despicable mini-huns winning this year), then Rangers will receive what they wanted all along: a kick in the bollocks from a man wearing marshmallow shoes.
Stewart Regan, the man with the peculiar taste in footwear, will um and aw and wait to see if FIFA really does threaten serious action. If they do, Rangers are f*****. If they don’t, Regan gets the marshmallow shoes out and the Orange Order plan their victory parade.
I have a horrible feeling it will be the latter.
Having just read Gaavsters piece I think the only thing I can say is “Holy S***!”
On a more serious note, could this, at this stage anyway, allegation be a possible reason behind the sale of Rangers to Whyte in the way it was handled.
I’m wondering if the Murray empire, or whoever, who handled the sale of Rangers to Whyte did not necessarily do sufficiently deep digging into Whytes financials and background because they wanted to off load Rangers with as little as possible “digging” into Murray and co. themselves.
Was Whyte buying Rangers a convenient cover up for the alleged mess that Murray and co now find themselves in?
Could the current Rangers fiasco have been a clever ploy to take the press heat off any story that “might” have broken about the Murray situation over the last 18 months?
“I’m not absolutely convinced I want to know the answer to this but I heard tonight that a club that goes bankrupt will be ” fined” 10 points or 30 points if the powers that be get their way – is that not tantamount to kicking someone when they’re down?”
The penalty is 10 points or a third of the points you got the previous season, whichever is the larger. And the point is to dissuade clubs from living outside their means and going into administration at all.
I do wonder what else the BBC uncovered but did not put into their doco. I suggest it would be explosive but legally may have been hard to prove. What Daly was told off the record would have been mind blowing.
Can we assume any investors Green has spoken to are investing solely on the proviso that they pick up none of the old debt and that every creditor can take a running jump?
I can see why Whyte was worried D and P were not going to be the admin boys, as anyone else would have investigated the real story on who was up whom.