It was Back to the Future on Saturday afternoon, listening to Aberdeen rescue a point against Dundee was more like 1985 than 2015. TV highlights suggest Aberdeen pounded Dundee, but three excellent goals were enough for the visitors to set the stage for Celtic to return to the top of the league against Motherwell on Wednesday.
Aberdeen have been imperious in recent months. Incredibly, apart from Dundee and Celtic, they have failed to keep a clean sheet only once (at drubbing at Hamilton) since September. That’s title challenging form in any language.
This run is unlikely to endure as the vagaries of form and fortune catch them up, but it appears our long wait for a notional title rival looks to be over. Which is good.
Any business with operating expenses in the region of £33m a year, which is £2.75m a month or just over £600k a week, that had to borrow £500k in the first week of the month in order to pay an unexpected tax bill of the same magnitude, will by now be in urgent need of funds to pay rates, other tax liabilities, electricity and gas (no matter how little they used on Friday), while wages day is approaching. And remember, those gardens don’t ‘duty’ themselves.
Newco Rangers will need a loan, or to sell a player for cash, to avoid imminently slipping into insolvency. If Dave King is confident about carrying shareholders at a March EGM, and has the resources, he should loan the club money to get them through the next two months, no strings attached. A bit like John Keane did for Celtic in 1994. With insolvency looming, Keane, currently a Celtic director, but at the time an agitator for boardroom change, wrote a seven figure cheque, no strings attached, to pay-down Celtic’s overdraft, as the Bank of Scotland threatened to call in administrators.
Anything less than this is playing into the hands of Mike Ashley.
CQN11 St Patrick’s Day Dinner Dance is on Friday 13 March, at the Kerrydale Suite, Celtic Park. The focus of an excellent night’s entertainment will be funding the construction of a kitchen at Chibwata Primary School in Malawi, for Mary’s Meals.
Email me if you would like to reserve a ticket, celticquicknews@gmail.com or book directly via the links at the bottom of this page.
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Gardening puns is it?
The plums for sale dried out, so the profits were pruned…..;-))
H.H.
I see McOist and McDowall have done walking away……A couple O “PANSIES”…
The raisin wined about how he couldn’t achieve grapeness…..;-))
H.H.
Sorry…..just heard that Petula Clark is running the training session for Sevco tomorrow. Sally and Kenny are considering management positions at Inter. Not Milan……Interflora
serious point for one moment.
your a footballer employed by a team that plays at the stadium that john brown played for.
tonight are you not on the phone to your agent ?
get me to fox out of here , any contract, anywhere.
all these rumers and gardening threads
i take it you heard them through the grape vine
AR
Hi bud. It is the only thing that stops me from wanting the big demolition ball smashing the red brick Victorian Lavvy into the Clyde. The endless river of humour, emanating out doomdome on a daily basis.
Mike Ashley is a serious businessman. He must be looking at the Ibrox shambles and wondering how he got suckered into this mess.
So far,he’s not down by an appreciable amount. I think he is wondering whether he should grab back his cash and get out of Dodge,or sit tight and screw them into the ground.
First scenario,he doesn’t lose money. Second,he doesn’t lose face.
Either way,they lose. Big time.
DELANEYSDUNKY
Yer nephew must be that bit closer to the first team now,what with all the departures!
Wish him well from me.
Guess all those with any self respect will be budding to burst…..away to pastures new…..;-))
H.H.
weeman67
Only a lttle weed left now, I’m sure he will be ript up soon by the real gardener.
Btw, if you want yo wind huns up, calll him Micheal Ashley, they will bite saying his name is Mike, to which you reply….he was christened Michael.
It works;)))
BMCUW.
Michael saw a cash cow and by feck he’s going to milk it :)
BMCUWP
eh? As far as i can tell MA holds all the cards…..if the SFA adhere to their own rules…..( stop sniggering at the back )…..his is the only game in town…..depending on who owns what, and that is the big question…..;-))
H.H.
BMCUW
Training with the first team at St.Andrews now since November. Had a few good games with U20s lately. He is more muscular and bigger since you met him. Good Fife and Tayside air and food and intense training with regular swims in the North Sea after training. Mental!
BITON
not on the scouts list at weekend, but now in the window,
they came and saw someone
In saying that, when Dave King fails the ” proper person ” criteria, there’s nothing to stop him appointing proxies & ruling from afar…..is there?
H.H.
sorry, ajax came and saw. thats who they were there to see,
THELURKINTIM
Correct,he holds all the cards,and can-as SIPSINI says-milk the club dry. But he is fiercely protective of his reputation as a ruthless operator.
Either of the two options I suggest will sink Rangers. And reinforce that reputation.
Most companies run a mile when he wanders into view. And there’s a very good reason for that.
did the norwegian bhoy sign for madrid yet ?
Damn distractions, trying to watch Battlestar Galactica, S4, ep1…..;-))
H.H.
DELANEYSDUNKY
Good lad,no wimpy wee barman’s gonna stop that lad enjoying his J2O in future!
Norwegian Blue: Deila recalls previous trip to Ibrox
Graeme Macpherson
Sports Writer
Tuesday 20 January 2015
RONNY DEILA has survived seven months living in the Glasgow goldfish bowl with his sense of humour intact.
The Celtic manager is an open and honest figure – occasionally to his detriment as he discovered this week after inadvertently irritating Jackie McNamara – but even he could see that there was little to be gained from wading too deep into the memory banks to recall a previous trip to Ibrox as a room full of hacks inched ever closer to the edge of their seats in anticipation.
The occasion was a boys’ trip to Glasgow around 15 years ago, this group of Norwegian tourists taking in a Rangers match against Motherwell as part of their visit. It would have been entirely natural had Deila sat in with the Rangers punters, a new red, white and blue scarf around his neck to enhance the experience but, with a smile, he was quick to quell such a thought, adding that – in the pre-Instagram era – he was fairly confident there would be no photographic evidence to prove to the contrary.
“I’d only been to Ibrox once before and that was about 15 years ago,” he recalled. “It was just a trip with my friends. I was a player in Norway at the time and was just with a group of boys having fun in Glasgow. We just sat in the stand like normal. You’re not getting me to say it was in the Rangers end! I think the game was against Motherwell and Rangers won 3-0.”
His second visit arrived in rather different circumstances, Deila this time in the directors’ box alongside his assistant John Collins for Rangers’ league match against Hearts last Friday night. It was something of a surreal experience. Not only was the match abandoned after just 20 minutes due to a frozen pitch, the evening unfolded to the backdrop of sustained protests by the Rangers support against the club’s custodians. It meant that for once the Celtic manager was not the most unpopular figure in the Ibrox directors box, the bulk of the ire saved for the men in Rangers blazers in the rows immediately behind him.
Deila was there to cast an eye over Rangers ahead of the teams’ League Cup semi-final on February 1 and was insistent it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip. “It was nice to be there, but the game shouldn’t have been played,” he said. “There was so much snow they could have gone cross-country skiing instead! But you get a feeling of the team and the stadium as well. So it was nice for me to be there.
“Everything has been very new for me here but it has been more than six months now and I feel much more prepared and confident now than I was when I started.
“You learn everything from experience and the game against Rangers is going to be a new experience for me. I’m looking forward to it. They were very nice to us at Ibrox on Friday night. It was quite professional, there were no problems for me being there. It was a good atmosphere.
“I still got something out of it, even though the game was abandoned. I also have assistants who know the Rangers team very well. I also watch their games on TV, so I think we will be well prepared for that game.”
The draw for the first Old Firm contest in almost three years was made on November 1 but as the date grows ever closer it is cropping up increasingly in conversation. Deila has been made well aware by people both inside and outside of Celtic Park just how significant a match this will be but he has refused to let it become a distraction. His team face Motherwell at home tomorrow night – where a victory will take them back to the top of the SPFL Premiership – and then Ross County away on Saturday prior to their date at Hampden and the manager insists those games remain his priority.
“You can feel the atmosphere around this [Old Firm] game already. But I don’t need to make it bigger than it is. We have to play a football game, that’s the most important thing. If we are going to win it, we have to play good football and that’s what we will prepare for.
“For me, I know it is a very big game. But we have so many exciting games coming up now. It’s a semi-final and if we win it we are in a cup final where we want to be. The game against Dundee in the Scottish Cup a week later is very important as well.
“The league is close just now, so you can only do one thing – which I’ve done for the last four months – and that is to think just one day ahead. You have to prepare well and see the whole picture.”
BMCUW,
I don’t like Ashley to be honest, he’s an abuser of workers, Zero hours and the rest.
I’ll wind the hun up at every turn though.
Off to my kip mate. HH
aye its a chalice you do the boucy dobbers , dobbies, garderness.
====================================
DTB would like to wish Kenny all the best for the future, many fans will be wondering now if the Rangers manager job has become a poison Chalice with all the infighting and upset going on in the Rangers boardroom.
how sad am i just told young dode when asked about THE NEW RANGERS game to be careful where he is watchin it, he is in Sydney he is goling to watch it in the cheers bar.
SIPSINI
Agreed.
IMO,he represents capitalism at its worst.
Though this article suggest agencies do that.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/jobs-agency-workers-britain-economy-insecure-low-paid-work
BMCUW
Mad Bankie oot his nut on J20 destroys wimpy wee barman in Cheltenham, in revenge attack.
This summer’s headlines! :))
Worthy repost of Murray critique
In Sundays Herald
awe_naw_no_annoni_oan_anaw_noo
13:21 on 18 January, 2015
Herald Scotland
Home > Business > Company News
The Fall of the House of Murray
Published on 18 January 2015
As tycoon David Murray’s once-thriving business empire folds with a barely audible whimper, Ian Fraser picks apart the disastrous sequence of seemingly limitless borrowing and bad decisions that precipitated the downfall
Sir David Murray’s metals-to-property conglomerate Murray International Holdings (MIH) died last week, going out not with a bang but a whimper.
MIH and eight subsidiary companies – Premier Property Group, PPG Land, Premier Burrell, GM Mining, Murray Group Holdings, Murray Group Management, Murray Outsourcing and MMH NSS – are to be liquidated by Deloitte.
The insolvency practitioners will be seeking to retrieve as much cash as they can from the firms’ assets and debtors before shutting down the companies for good.
Since the credit crisis blew a massive hole in Murray’s business plans six years ago, his bank, Lloyds – which completed its disastrous acquisition of HBOS in January 2009 – appears to have treated him with kid gloves.
It had few qualms about pulling the plug on other HBOS customers who had built up massive debts with HBOS, such as John Kennedy’s Kenmore, Jonathon Milne’s FM Developments and Ken Ross’s Elphinstone Group.
But Lloyds was prepared to give Murray five-and-a-half years to disentangle and dismantle as much as he could of his business empire, as well allowing Murray Capital, a new private concern of Murray and his son, David junior, to cherry-pick some of his most cherished assets.
The reason for this unusual leniency from Lloyds was ascribed to Murray’s tough negotiation skills, and highlighting the number of dependent Scots employees in a diverse group.
.In his pomp in the 1990s and early 2000s, David Murray was viewed as one of Scotland’s most successful entrepreneurs. He caught the eye of Bank of Scotland’s former treasurer and managing director Gavin Masterton, and the bank first lent Murray money in 1981
.Bank of Scotland went on to lend him the entire £6 million he needed to buy Rangers FC in 1988. By 2008, as part of HBOS, it had provided him with £900 million of debt to bankroll his wide-ranging business operations, which once encompassed commercial property, coal mining, metals trading and football. This was despite the fact that, even at its peak, the turnover of Murray’s group holding company never exceeded £550m.
HBOS senior bankers including chief executive of corporate banking Peter Cummings and the late Ian Robertson, managing director of corporate banking, gave Murray what amounted to an open cheque book.
Together, Murray and HBOS formed a complex web of joint-venture companies into which hundreds of millions of pounds of the bank’s money were poured. In most of these property deals, the bank was effectively lending up to 40% of the money to itself.
Robertson, nicknamed “Robbo”, was infamous for “Robbo rollovers” – deals by which the bank rolled over existing loans into newly created special purpose vehicles, effectively making bad debts disappear in a puff of smoke.
One banking analyst said: “Property assets that ought to have gone into insolvency, or into HBOS’s intensive-care unit – which would have required the bank to book a provision for bad debt – were instead rolled over.
”The roll-overs are said to have compounded Murray’s situation after the credit markets crashed, complicating his business empire’s problems. However, one of Murray’s more astute moves in the past decade was to sell his Murray International Metals business for £119m in 2005.
From the mid-2000s onwards, having witnessed the success that the likes of Sir Tom Hunter were having in commercial property, Murray massively boosted his group’s exposure to commercial real estate, snapping up provincial shopping centres and office buildings from Edinburgh to London.
The number of deals accelerated after Robbo’s successor, Ray Robertson, former head of real estate at Bank of Scotland Corporate, assumed day-to-day responsibility for his affairs at the bank. Both Robertsons had such faith in Murray and his Premier Property Group they seemed willing to lend millions with few questions asked, though it was the worst of times to be investing in and developing commercial properties.
Things started to go badly awry when Murray moved away from calculated risk-taking and started using HBOS’s loans for what looked more like reckless gambling. This coincided from 2005 onwards with the adoption of what HBOS insiders call “kamikaze lending to the great and the good” as it sought to grow its corporate loan book by some 20% per annum to compensate for a slowdown in other aspects of its business.
Even after property markets weakened, Murray seemed impervious to the risk of a property crash. One month after the global financial crisis started in August 2007, PPG had some £500m of development projects under way, including a 175,000sqft speculative office development in Glasgow’s Bothwell Street.
MIH was going to be able to defy economic gravity thanks to what Murray described in the 2008 annual report as “the breadth and depth of the group’s diversified portfolio and management team”.
When HBOS collapsed under the weight of massive bad debts and a short-sighted funding model, and the bank succumbed to Lloyds TSB in September 2008, the game was up for Murray.
He and other tycoons had been used to picking up the phone to HBOS and receiving hundreds of millions of pounds within hours. That all changed after Murray’s accounts were transferred to Lloyds’s non-core business support unit (BSU), whose goal is to maximise value from distressed borrowers
.One of the BSU’s first goals was to persuade Murray to offload Rangers, partly because the club was such an obvious drain on resources and partly as it was seen as a distraction for the hands-on Murray.
One ex-bank insider said Lloyds simply wanted out of football clubs: “Rangers was just soaking up cash. You can’t build a football business on overdrafts and borrowing, but that is what Murray seemed to be doing..
“Two-and-a-half years after ceasing to be Rangers’ chairman in October 2009, Murray sold his 85.3% equity stake in Rangers Football Club to Craig Whyte for £1. The club subsequently collapsed into chaos that continues to this day.
Lloyds continued to allow Murray to do two massive debt-for-equity swaps which, given the fact that MIH’s equity was by now as good as worthless, were essentially free gifts. The first, in April 2010, saw Lloyds write off £150m of debt in exchange for an additional 12% stake in the company.
Conditions included that Murray must liquidate three-quarters of MIH’s commercial property portfolio by 2015; introduce greater transparency into his business dealings; and stop using cross-guarantees, by which healthy and profitable parts of his empire were used to support more anaemic parts like Rangers. Such cross-support makes it more difficult to hive off businesses to third-party buyers.
A string of disposals, including that of oil and gas business Premier Hytemp and three shopping centres (sold for less than half their purchase price), followed. Unusually, in what seems to have been a sweetheart deal, the bank allowed Murray to personally buy back his private equity business Charlotte Ventures, partly because the assets within it, which included a stake in bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis, were seen as too high risk for the bank.
Murray said the purchase of the unit, later renamed Murray Capital, was “done arm’s length, at market value”. A second £118m debt-for-equity swap followed in March 2012, the negotiations for which are said to have been extended and heated.
Murray claimed the deal – which took the amount of debt that had effectively been written off by Lloyds to £268.5m – did not dilute the Murray family’s 70% voting power over MIH.
Talking about the winding-down of MIH, Murray said: “This has been a consensual approach with the bank, and it has been an orderly, managed process. It’s not been easy – it could have been easier to walk away and not do it – but it was decided with the lender that we would work this out, and we have
”There are major assets which remain unsold, including Response, the call-centre business. It lost a contract with BSkyB, but has since won one for Scottish Power. In another unusual move, Lloyds let Murray and his family, through Murray Capital, buy Murray Estates, which owns about 1200 acres of prime development sites across Scotland’s central belt for just £13.9m. In addition to Murray Estates, Murray Capital also snapped up other unwanted MIH assets.
The Murray Estates portfolio includes a 13-acre site at Ratho Station on the western edge of Edinburgh, a 26-acre site near Edinburgh Airport, a 300-acre site at Torrance Park in North Lanarkshire, the 135-acre Kingdom Park site in Kirkcaldy and the 675-acre Garden District on greenbelt land adjacent to the Edinburgh City Bypass near Gogarburn.
The latter offers scope for a £1 billion development of 3500 homes, a showcase garden project called Calyx and a new community stadium. For many years Murray has been piecing together so-called “ransom strips” to the east of Edinburgh Airport’s approach road, with a view to galvanising a wider development project called the International Business Gateway.
Things are already moving fast for the some of Murray Estates’ development sites. In November, Fife Council granted planning permission for the construction of a £500m residential district at Kingdom Park over 20 years. The same month, pre-construction work got under way on a £60m mixed-use development for phase one of Torrance Park in Holytown.
In its 2013 annual report, MIH said funding difficulties meant it was unable to develop the Murray Estates sites itself. MIH added it had considered selling the land in a piecemeal fashion to other developers but then “received an unsolicited approach from the Murray family in spring 2013 to acquire the majority of assets in the portfolio of Murray Estates”
.A spokesman for Lloyds said the Murray Estates deal included an “anti-embarrassment clause” which enables the bank to secure a share of the upside should Murray Estates’ projects come good, but declined to give details.
The MIH 2013 accounts noted: “The transaction completed after protracted negotiations and was supported by advice from two independent firms of chartered surveyors … plus significant potential additional consideration based on profits realised over 10 years
.”Intriguingly, even though Murray Capital (formerly known as Charlotte Ventures) also banks with Lloyds, Murray made clear Lloyds did not fund the £13.9m acquisition. He added that the non-embarrassment clause is geared to enable the bank to get a bigger share of gains if projects are sold or developed quickly, saying: “It was put in place to stop us flipping things for a quick gain.
”Overall, Murray has been shown far greater leniency than other failed property tycoons after Lloyds/HBOS was bailed out and commercial property prices crashed. One ex-HBOS insider has suggested that it was because he was “one of the great and good, like Tom Farmer and Tom Hunter”
.All three have been knighted, with Murray receiving his – for services to business in Scotland – in June 2007. The source added: “Sir David never had the great fall, the humiliation that some of the other over-leveraged property tycoons were made to feel.
”His businesses’ outstanding debt to Lloyds stands at up to £346.7m, and the bank has, to date, written off £268.5m through debt-for-equity swaps, which suggests that the collapse of his business has left a £615m hole in Lloyds’s accounts, and that two-thirds of the money Murray’s businesses borrowed has been lost.
And because of the 2008 bailouts, it is effectively taxpayers who are picking up the tab. Meanwhile, he has walked away from the wreckage of his failed group with some of its most promising assets under his belt
.It is perhaps unsurprising that Murray presents the winding-up of his erstwhile business empire as a sort of triumph. Writing in the MIH 2013 accounts, he said: “In the prevailing economic conditions since 2009, the delivery of the numerous asset disposals and debt-reduction programme represents a significant achievement and a very credible performance
.”He said: “It’s not been without some casualties but we’ve done the best we could. The proceeds from the disposals have been optimised, enabling us to secure continued employment for more than 95% of the group’s 2008 workforce and minimising losses to other stakeholders and creditors. One of the reasons we have come through this as well as we have is that we had some prime assets and some good trading businesses. All the small creditors have been paid in full and everyone’s been paid their redundancy
.”Lloyds refused to comment “on the grounds of customer confidentiality”, but others might see Murray, along with ba!onus-crazed bankers in rescued banks, as the ultimate pet of the sugar daddy state.
DODE
I reckon he’ll be safe enough in Cheers!
Well-known as the main place for Tims in that neck of the woods.
DELANEYSDUNKY
‘Surgeons unsure how to proceed with removal!’
Rangers manager’s job has become a poison Chalice…..haha..ha.ha.haha….well u get the rest…..holymoly, look at the tim(e)…..;-))
H.H.
New sevco manager I will go for Ralph Fiennes
The Constant Gardener :)
bmcw
thanks pal i know i may sound sad but they zombies are angry even in oz!
DODE
Yer quite right to be concerned,mate. They’re a vile crew.
An Tearmann
01:00 on 20 January, 2015
——————————————————————————
is always worthy of a repost…..if only because it needs re-reading more than once…..;-))
H.H.
bmcw
i take it ye stay in oz
This just gets funnier with each watch and turn from Sevco.
Thanks 16roads.
http://captiongenerator.com/29168/mike-ashely-is-a-tim#.VL2b-6g01WY.twitter.funny
:-)
HH
BMCUW
Would imagine the bottle would be closer to the gullet after insertion.