I took and made a few calls after the BBC broke the news about Rangers liquidation. So much to discuss, so many possibilities and so much uncertainty remains. Rangers are gone and whatever you think or hear about a Newco, it will be a shadow of the club Rangers were in the early 80s, never mind today. But still, we have plenty to focus on as we prepare for the enormous events that lie ahead.
I then took a call from my Dad who told me to forget about tomorrow. “This day is about history, about all the events over all the years”. How true.
My friends in Celtic, tonight raise a glass to Celtic fans past, who never lived to see how this Battle of the Ages ended, celebrate for each of them. Celebrate all of those league titles and cups you were denied which were ‘won’ illegally by Rangers over the last 14 years. Celebrate for every hard working man and woman in the country who pays their tax every month, no matter the hardship. This is a victory for all of us. LLLLLLLLLLLiquidation Day is here!
We’ll worry about how other clubs plan to get their hands on your money tomorrow.
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no white knights
no blue knights
just
barron knights
Years from now mothers will scare their children when they have been behaving badly by telling them stories about (and showing them photies) of the Glasgow Rangers.
sky been churning out hun sympathysers all day.
goram,alex rae,gordon smith ect
never a alternative view from the rest of us who
have been cheated for years.
the sooner sky go the same way as the n.o.w
and the orcs the better
‘This is a warrant for the proper detailed lengthy and forensic investigation of just what Murray & Whyte were doing at Rangers’
@alextomo
charles kickham on 12 June, 2012 at 16:03 said:
no white knights
no blue knights
just
barron knights
……………………………………
What about the Night Nights.
Does anyone have any info on how gate receipts are divided up in other leagues? Is it all generally retained by the home team? Genuine question by the way.
Whilst it would be a blow for us to have to hand over a bigger percentage to visiting teams, it might be tempered by the fact that such a change to the rules would hamper Der Hun far more as they seek to avoid relegation with a threadbare squad.
I would imagine the net result of such a rule change would reduce our winning league margin by a few points, but would likely drag TFOD back into the chasing pack to a considerable extent.
I believe I could live with that personally.
HappyDaysCSC
Smith on SSN “I don’t think there are any positives to take from this”, “the only positive to take from this is the club will survive”.
Eh, Naw they won’t. They are dead, get your baldy hide round it.
Delusional buns.
Armageddon arrives at Mogadon. No one deserves to be this happy
Oh dear lord this came up on my gmail as an advert
CVL Voluntary Liquidation – http://www.sterlingford.co.uk – Expert advice, obligation free Fees from £2,000
Paul:
We all owe you, Phil MacG, and RTC a huge vote of thanks on this momentous day. You have been fearless in shining a light on the dark practices of Rangers (in liquidation). Thanks a million!
Now for the next challenges. The HMRC statement leaves open the question of acquistion by Green. Given the unknowns (sanctions, license, Newco application, audited accounts, transfer embargo, double contract penalties, player defections, one wonders whether he would be willing to proceed. If a liquidator disposes of the assets elsewhere, one assumes the new owner would have to repay the loan that Duff and Duffer claim he has already paid.
With any luck, Lord Carloway will suspend Rangers for a year, because it looks as if Doncaster and Regan are too craven to act. One certainty from today’s statement is that Ogilvie and Murray et al will not be sleeping easy over the next few months.
Still not one word of contrition from anyone at Rangers. The next week is crucial. Let’s hope the chairmen stand firm and refuse entry to the SPL for this vile club.
Iniquitous
Gordon Smith on SSN
The only positive that can be taken from LIQUIDATION is that the club will survive and come back from this ?!?!?!?
YOU’RE DEAD!
The glorious twelfth
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe
What now for the SFA hearing regarding the transfer embargo punishment. Is this now a nonstarter because they are dead?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, Alex Thomson sticks the boot in big time:
http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/rangers-taxman-walk/1899
FFS. Colin Hendrie on SSN now. Do these peepel have no sense of irony? We already know that they have no shame.
Baldy hide, should have said heid. My phone is so excited its messing up my words!
Alex Thomson
http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/rangers-taxman-walk/1899
latest from Alex Thomson
http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/rangers-taxman-walk/1899
Today’s the day the taxman, in the shape of HMRC, said not only will he not be walking away from Rangers, but that they, the HMRC, “are the people”. And the people not only want their money back from this catastrophically mismanaged “football club”, but now they want to come after the men who reduced the once proud name of Ibrox to a pathetic byword for toxic governance.
And that is the real story.
It is not often that you are on holiday and find your plans are interrupted by the Voice of the Taxman, and it is hardly ever anything but bad news, I would imagine. But I have to report barely concealed joy and enthusiasm from my contact in HMRC who once memorably told me, referring to Rangers Football Club: “Remember our Eleventh Commandment, Alex – Thou Shalt Not Get Away With It.”
Not the kind of language HMRC regularly employs, but Rangers was always going to be big for them. Very big. An example. A test case. A litmus test. Take your image, but you get their drift.
So now it is all about a proper investigation. Bluntly, a CVA (company voluntary arrangement) would have allowed far too much to be simply swept under the carpet. Years of evidence, allegations, arguably an entire Ibrox culture of funny money and living beyond everyone’s means, can, as the HMRC put it this morning “now be properly investigated – and let me say there is no way we could have done that under any proposed CVA deal”.
When the CVA was proposed down at Portsmouth FC, the taxman was promised all kinds of phone number figures from any amount of whacky offshore accounts etc and guess what? Yes – they got a fraction of nowt out of it, in the end.
They were not minded at all to go down the same route this time.
In short, this is a warrant for the proper, detailed, lengthy and forensic investigation of just what David Murray, and to some extent Craig Whyte, were doing at Rangers and – yes – all those men who walked away from the club they professed to cherish and love and have run from any serious kind of questions ever since in the celebrated style of Glasgow football, largely unencumbered by any pursuit and awkward questions from the complaint press of that city who cannot handle the idea that Rangers was after so many years too corrupted to survive liquidation.
Well, now it is time to get used to the truth and reality so widely predicted and investigated online and by those notable journalists in broadcasting and papers around Glasgow who bucked the trend. They can all hold their heads high today after all the years of abuse.
The succulent lamb just went off. The stench will hang around Rangers for years to come.
So a CVL (creditors’ voluntary liquidation) is, the HMRC believes, a way of taking the gloves off, and getting to grips with, the former directors which a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) could never have done, in their view.
Getting away with it just became very, very much more difficult for all the directors involved with Rangers over the past 15 years or so, and nobody – least of all Rangers fans – can possibly do anything but welcome that fact, whatever it means for the club.
Today HMRC said this: “A CVL is the statutory process whereby a company’s assets are realised by an insolvency practitioner (the liquidator – BDO in this case it seems) and paid out to its creditors. If there is not enough to pay creditors in full after the costs of the liquidation, they will receive only a proportion of their claims. The directors and employees of the company play no part in the liquidation.”
Moreover, the actions across recent months of administrators Duff & Phelps might well now come under scrutiny. Given some of the more bizarre twists and turns, it would be astonishing if they did not.
The HMRC again: “Liquidators are required by regulatory best practice to undertake a certain minimum level of investigation into the actions of the directors of the company in the run up to its liquidation. These investigations may reveal legal actions which only liquidators can take whereby directors can be ordered by the court to compensate the company in respect of any wrongdoings they may have committed during the pre-liquidation period. If the liquidator considers it economic to pursue such actions he will do so. ”
Not only that. There are wide powers to investigate and take actions against directors including –
– Wrongful trading: directors can be ordered to make a payment to the company if they continue incurring debt at a time they should reasonably have known the company could not avoid going into liquidation.
– Transaction at an undervalue: where a director has caused an asset to be transferred to a connected party for less than its true value at a time when the company was insolvent, the asset can be transferred back to the company or the person benefitting can be ordered to compensate the company. An example would be a director buying his own company car for £1.
– Preference: where a director has paid someone with the intention of making them better off in the event of a liquidation than they would otherwise have been then they can be ordered to pay compensation to the company. An example would be a director causing the company to pay a debt that he had personally guaranteed so he would not have to meet that debt himself when the company goes into liquidation.
– Misfeasance: this covers a wide variety of breaches of duty by directors. Duties of directors are set out in the companies act and include such matters as putting the company’s interests first, and not taking account of the director’s personal interests.
And just to top it off, under the liquidation the liquidators also now have all kinds of powers to get information from directors and others with inside knowledge of the football club, and they can use the courts to do it if they have to.
Or to put it another way, Rangers directors of the recent past can run from the questions, if they like – but hiding would be futile.
So the HMRC are pretty much where they want to be in all this. And anyone who believes that if you try to thwart the taxman, they should come after you, will no doubt agree.
Questions therefore for several Scottish MSPs and First Minister Alex Salmond to answer about their blatant political interference with the HMRC – several MSPs blatantly and publicly attempting to pressure the taxman away from any liquidation. I know from sources within HMRC that basically all they managed to achieve was to antagonise the taxman who simply wanted everyone to play by the rules and for there to be no special case, no exceptions and no special pleadings.
At the time when Channel 4 News dared question whether or not their actions might not be counter-productive, given that Holyrood has no powers over HMRC, the hue and cry from said MSPs and Mr Salmond’s minders was long and loud. I wonder if they are re-examining their actions today?
And then there’s the football side of things, for Rangers did also masquerade as a football club during the long years of apparently being a casino. In immediate terms –
1. Rangers will be banned from European competition for three years.
2. Most of their players can and will leave in the coming weeks often – many having no doubt had enough of doing their bit on wage cuts of up to 75 per cent.
3. The club still faces the Big Tax Case tribunal decision laughingly due “soon after Easter”, and on that the HMRC still have no news, this could see Rangers face a further tax bill of up to £70m in dues and penalties.
4. The Scottish Premier League will soon run out of excuses to not report on its investigation into alleged wrongful player registration which, if the club is found guilty as charged, could see the club losing much of its silverware won over the past decade or so.t
5. The liquidation makes it even more difficult for both the Scottish Premier League and its appeal body the Scottish Football Association to readmit and license Rangers to play in the Scottish Premier League.
6. Despite the Green consortium’s lofty statements about buying the club’s assets, there is no guarantee that they will in fact be bought up as a job lot. There is no guarantee about simply playing on at Ibrox. There are, as things stand, few guarantees in terms of the asset sale at all.
It is hard to see any way forward with any kind of probity except starting a clean sheet at the foot of the Third Division in Scotland and playing their way back, thereby sending a message across the sporting world, at last, that some things matter more than money – even in football.
And that is what many Rangers fans – for so long ignored in all this and the people most badly sold down the river by those who “managed” their club – want to see happen. To that extent they are the people, the people who matter, and, unlike all their directors, they did not walk away and they will not.
I knew when I tried to login here an hour ago something big had happened.
Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jn8K8EA7-Q
Green Lantern
Has he got his Blue Tartan suit on?
Rangers: the taxman will not walk away
Today’s the day the taxman, in the shape of HMRC, said not only will he not be walking away from Rangers, but that they, the HMRC, “are the people”. And the people not only want their money back from this catastrophically mismanaged “football club”, but now they want to come after the men who reduced the once proud name of Ibrox to a pathetic byword for toxic governance.
And that is the real story.
It is not often that you are on holiday and find your plans are interrupted by the Voice of the Taxman, and it is hardly ever anything but bad news, I would imagine. But I have to report barely concealed joy and enthusiasm from my contact in HMRC who once memorably told me, referring to Rangers Football Club: “Remember our Eleventh Commandment, Alex – Thou Shalt Not Get Away With It.”
Not the kind of language HMRC regularly employs, but Rangers was always going to be big for them. Very big. An example. A test case. A litmus test. Take your image, but you get their drift.
So now it is all about a proper investigation. Bluntly, a CVA (company voluntary arrangement) would have allowed far too much to be simply swept under the carpet. Years of evidence, allegations, arguably an entire Ibrox culture of funny money and living beyond everyone’s means, can, as the HMRC put it this morning “now be properly investigated – and let me say there is no way we could have done that under any proposed CVA deal”.
When the CVA was proposed down at Portsmouth FC, the taxman was promised all kinds of phone number figures from any amount of whacky offshore accounts etc and guess what? Yes – they got a fraction of nowt out of it, in the end.
They were not minded at all to go down the same route this time.
In short, this is a warrant for the proper, detailed, lengthy and forensic investigation of just what David Murray, and to some extent Craig Whyte, were doing at Rangers and – yes – all those men who walked away from the club they professed to cherish and love and have run from any serious kind of questions ever since in the celebrated style of Glasgow football, largely unencumbered by any pursuit and awkward questions from the complaint press of that city who cannot handle the idea that Rangers was after so many years too corrupted to survive liquidation.
Well, now it is time to get used to the truth and reality so widely predicted and investigated online and by those notable journalists in broadcasting and papers around Glasgow who bucked the trend. They can all hold their heads high today after all the years of abuse.
The succulent lamb just went off. The stench will hang around Rangers for years to come.
So a CVL (creditors’ voluntary liquidation) is, the HMRC believes, a way of taking the gloves off, and getting to grips with, the former directors which a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) could never have done, in their view.
Getting away with it just became very, very much more difficult for all the directors involved with Rangers over the past 15 years or so, and nobody – least of all Rangers fans – can possibly do anything but welcome that fact, whatever it means for the club.
Today HMRC said this: “A CVL is the statutory process whereby a company’s assets are realised by an insolvency practitioner (the liquidator – BDO in this case it seems) and paid out to its creditors. If there is not enough to pay creditors in full after the costs of the liquidation, they will receive only a proportion of their claims. The directors and employees of the company play no part in the liquidation.”
Moreover, the actions across recent months of administrators Duff & Phelps might well now come under scrutiny. Given some of the more bizarre twists and turns, it would be astonishing if they did not.
The HMRC again: “Liquidators are required by regulatory best practice to undertake a certain minimum level of investigation into the actions of the directors of the company in the run up to its liquidation. These investigations may reveal legal actions which only liquidators can take whereby directors can be ordered by the court to compensate the company in respect of any wrongdoings they may have committed during the pre-liquidation period. If the liquidator considers it economic to pursue such actions he will do so. ”
Not only that. There are wide powers to investigate and take actions against directors including –
– Wrongful trading: directors can be ordered to make a payment to the company if they continue incurring debt at a time they should reasonably have known the company could not avoid going into liquidation.
– Transaction at an undervalue: where a director has caused an asset to be transferred to a connected party for less than its true value at a time when the company was insolvent, the asset can be transferred back to the company or the person benefitting can be ordered to compensate the company. An example would be a director buying his own company car for £1.
– Preference: where a director has paid someone with the intention of making them better off in the event of a liquidation than they would otherwise have been then they can be ordered to pay compensation to the company. An example would be a director causing the company to pay a debt that he had personally guaranteed so he would not have to meet that debt himself when the company goes into liquidation.
– Misfeasance: this covers a wide variety of breaches of duty by directors. Duties of directors are set out in the companies act and include such matters as putting the company’s interests first, and not taking account of the director’s personal interests.
And just to top it off, under the liquidation the liquidators also now have all kinds of powers to get information from directors and others with inside knowledge of the football club, and they can use the courts to do it if they have to.
Or to put it another way, Rangers directors of the recent past can run from the questions, if they like – but hiding would be futile.
So the HMRC are pretty much where they want to be in all this. And anyone who believes that if you try to thwart the taxman, they should come after you, will no doubt agree.
Questions therefore for several Scottish MSPs and First Minister Alex Salmond to answer about their blatant political interference with the HMRC – several MSPs blatantly and publicly attempting to pressure the taxman away from any liquidation. I know from sources within HMRC that basically all they managed to achieve was to antagonise the taxman who simply wanted everyone to play by the rules and for there to be no special case, no exceptions and no special pleadings.
At the time when Channel 4 News dared question whether or not their actions might not be counter-productive, given that Holyrood has no powers over HMRC, the hue and cry from said MSPs and Mr Salmond’s minders was long and loud. I wonder if they are re-examining their actions today?
And then there’s the football side of things, for Rangers did also masquerade as a football club during the long years of apparently being a casino. In immediate terms –
1. Rangers will be banned from European competition for three years.
2. Most of their players can and will leave in the coming weeks often – many having no doubt had enough of doing their bit on wage cuts of up to 75 per cent.
3. The club still faces the Big Tax Case tribunal decision laughingly due “soon after Easter”, and on that the HMRC still have no news, this could see Rangers face a further tax bill of up to £70m in dues and penalties.
4. The Scottish Premier League will soon run out of excuses to not report on its investigation into alleged wrongful player registration which, if the club is found guilty as charged, could see the club losing much of its silverware won over the past decade or so.t
5. The liquidation makes it even more difficult for both the Scottish Premier League and its appeal body the Scottish Football Association to readmit and license Rangers to play in the Scottish Premier League.
6. Despite the Green consortium’s lofty statements about buying the club’s assets, there is no guarantee that they will in fact be bought up as a job lot. There is no guarantee about simply playing on at Ibrox. There are, as things stand, few guarantees in terms of the asset sale at all.
It is hard to see any way forward with any kind of probity except starting a clean sheet at the foot of the Third Division in Scotland and playing their way back, thereby sending a message across the sporting world, at last, that some things matter more than money – even in football.
And that is what many Rangers fans – for so long ignored in all this and the people most badly sold down the river by those who “managed” their club – want to see happen. To that extent they are the people, the people who matter, and, unlike all their directors, they did not walk away and they will not.
Wish my old man could have lived to see this day. The illusion of dignity is over. The delusion of supremacy is stalled. I am a happy Tim.
does this put Duff & Duffer in the queue for their 7p in the pound as well ?
What is the Stars on 12 June, 2012 at 15:58:
“Oh and by the way
“The Celtic Board are a disgrace,never uttering a statement during all this
Bloody forelock tugging,soup taking,back of the bus sitting etc”
You must be wan o’ they Old Firm supporters…
For the benefit of any lurking huns:
Definition of ‘Liquidation’: When a business or firm is terminated or bankrupt, its assets are sold and the proceeds pay creditors. Any leftovers are distributed to shareholders.
Terminated. Finished. Over. The end.
Get it now?
How can liquidators sell Ipox, if wee Craigy bhoy has transferred it to another Company?
BBC 1609:
Our cameraman at Ibrox has been in touch to say lots of Rangers staff in club blazers have entered the stadium. What a grim day for all at the club.
They want the blazers back…
!Bada Bing!! on 12 June, 2012 at 15:58 said:
RalphWaldoEllison fights ALS-The list is endless mate,the dual contracts will get UEFA involved,teams will be suing for millions.The question which will come from this is,who sanctioned the Euro licence for the huns to actually play in Europe?
……
An endless list of payback for years of cheating.
As for that licence, well we know how that would work in Scottish Football.
A lot of squeaky bums at Hampden now.
HH
New Club – season tickets released via Ticketus
Goram says Coisty’s a street fighter.
That’s nice.
It’s good to have something to fall back on if the day job goes Pete Tong.
u
Ray Singh-Carr
EPL clubs all get 100% of their gate receipts from league games. In FA cup its split between both teams.
Not sure about other leagues but unless anyone knows for certain my guess is that home gate receipts are retained by home club. Matchday revenue is one of the areas Deloitte mention in their report and Celtic were 10th last year in matchday revenue.
This makes up 60% of Celtic’s revenue compared with an average of 22% for the Top 20 clubs in Europe (by total revenue).
Giving away half of our matchday revenue just because Rangers overspent and might have to leave the SPL would be incredibly unfair and I think could be very hard to take for the Celtic Board who have done so well operating on such a small budget.
Mort
Accountancy Age reports that BDO partners Malcolm Cohen and James Stephen will be appointed joint-liquidators to Rangers.
Cohen said: “Once BDO is formally appointed, the joint liquidators will be seeking to protect any remaining assets, maximise recoveries for the benefit of creditors, and investigate the reasons behind the failure of the company.”
If there’s one thing that lot understand, it is street fighting …
WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING RANKERS!
blazingsaddles.csc
HH
/Bishop B
Apocalypse now….
Well done to Paul67, RTC and all others that have led the charge to this day…
Interesting snippet (amongst many) from BDO who are sharpening those pencils…
“Accountancy Age reports that BDO partners Malcolm Cohen and James Stephen will be appointed joint-liquidators to Rangers.
Cohen said: “Once BDO is formally appointed, the joint liquidators will be seeking to protect any remaining assets, maximise recoveries for the benefit of creditors, and investigate the reasons behind the failure of the company.””
“maximise recoveries for the benefit of creditors” – isn’t that what the former administrators of RFCiA (now liquidated) should have been doing all along? This sends a clear signal that Green will not just waltz into Ibrox and get everything on the cheap.
Cracked crests, anybody? (thumbsup)
Just on, have they signed Gattuso yet? Shevchenko also saying he want to end his career with the True Blues. Says he’s going to get Ibramovich to invest in them too. They’ll be back bigger and stronger next year – what’s our board up to? I demand to know!
Have just downloaded The Liquidator by Harry J Allstars from Amazon to my MP3.
Will be playing it later with my Champagne and Cohiba.
Allahu Akbar.
ABZMike: It’s been obvious for months that Duff & Duffer have been working for Murray / White / Green / that fat big hoose guy rather than those they were supposed to be representing — all the creditors ripped off the RIA. I expect that malfeasance to bring official scrutiny before the fall out is clear …