Neil Doncaster has uttered the words “Prima Facie” more often than any other figure in public life since February when Celtic Quick News first asked if Rangers EBT payments were declared to the football authorities, almost always after the words “we don’t know if there is a”. While we are all assuming the SPL have now established Rangers have a case to answer for illegally registering footballers for over a decade, it’s important to hear the words.
Rangers refused to submit information to the SPL for three months and only did so under the duress of a deadline, but we don’t know what they have submitted. I have been concerned that Rangers would simply try to brass the entire episode out, submit the contracts the SFA and SPL already had, and deny having any record of side agreements.
Consider the clubs modus operandi in recent months and years. Sir David Murray provided cover in March, categorically denying side contracts existed, while the current men in charge have been too busy to spare much time researching the issue. A response of “We don’t have any information” would not have surprised me. Rangers submitting full information – including details on the side letters which exist but which the BBC do not have – would surprise me.
The SPL should have realised months ago they would get nothing from Rangers without a deadline but they are in awkward position if the answer from the club is not what is expected. It’s far from clear that they can take evidence from the BBC and may require information from the First Tier Tribunal verdict to substantiate what everyone knows. The verdict is unlikely to confirm any names.
Until Mr Doncaster says “Prima Facie evidence exists” we should not assume this episode is on track to be dealt with.
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Does anyone know if HMRC can have D&P removed ?
Ernie:
I did not write it, I copied and pasted it because I thought it was interesting and may interest others. I am not a lawyer nor a company insolvency expert. I don’t know who is right or who is wrong but the guy seems to have written an un-biased article. Like the guy said, forming an opinion on what is going on is like looking through a kaleidoscope with your head buried in quick sand.
I enjoy your opinion on his opinion but tell me this Ernie, with consideration of what you know and what you tend to believe… why are Rangers still breathing because for the life of me I can’t work it out.
With twenty orange parades in Glasgow today and the council funding their parties they are doing what they do best…screwing the tax payer.
kitalba on 2 June, 2012 at 09:19 said
Correct matey any other company and they would have been gone by now and our club was going to be shut for a few million.
It’s laughable.
ernie lynch and kitalba, good morning
Just to give me asome sort of reference, do you have an idea how much Celtic Park is worth on Cetic’s “books”?
Thanks
Kevtic 09:01 – imo.the reason why WGS didn’t play bobo was simply the shift from 532 to 442 formations. Bobo was fine at the centre of 3 central defence, but his limitations were shown up with only 2 CBs.
WGS and lawwell tried to punt him, got offers, but personal terms got on the way. That’s Bobo’s prerogative.
Put me down as a strachan fan, I am pleased that through a longer lense his achievements are being recongised. Arguably it was he who killed rangers as his 3iar prompted them to bring back smith and his profligate spending.
Well done Gordon!
MerseyCelt:
You might find this interesting, by the same author.
Rangers’ Big Day at a glance
Posted on May 29, 2012 by Rev. Stuart Campbell
Well, it’s safe to say it’s all kicked off big-time today, with not one but two massive developments in the Neverending (Rangers) Story. Firstly, you can read the entire CVA document for yourself here. But these are the bullet points:
1. The £8.5m Charles Green and his consortium (“Sevco”) intend to fund their purchase of Rangers with is in fact a loan, to be paid back (with interest) by 2020 [Section 4.20], despite Green’s previous pledge to run the club “debt-free”.
2. According to the BBC, Duff & Phelps’ fees during the period of administration to date are £5.5m, leaving just £3m in the pot for the creditors.
3. Highly unusually, the proposal doesn’t actually specify a percentage creditors will be paid. But Rangers’ current debts are in the region of £55m, meaning the maximum payout to unsecured creditors will be slightly over 5p in the £. The actual figure is impossible to gauge, as the CVA proposal document is full of unknown sums marked “TBC”, such as the amount owed to Craig Whyte. [Schedule 8]
4. Should Rangers lose the Big Tax Case the debt will at least double, but is widely thought likely to increase by even more, taking the total to around £150m. This would reduce the maximum payout to unsecured creditors to 2p in the £.
5. Should the CVA be rejected by creditors, Green has a contractual obligation to purchase the club’s assets for £5.5m (presumably again in the form of a loan, though this isn’t explicitly specified) and liquidate it, saving himself £3m. [Section 4.23] By coincidence the purchase price is exactly the sum quoted by the BBC for Duff & Phelps’ fees, leaving precisely £0 in the pot for creditors.
6. The creditors therefore have a choice between accepting a maximum of 5p in the £ (but likely much less than that), or getting nothing at all.
More coming as we unravel it. All we can say is that in a world where Robert Mugabe is about to be made a UN tourism ambassador and the head of the IMF doesn’t pay any tax, the notion of a bankrupt football club with £50m of unpayable debt and up to £100m more hanging over it BORROWING the money to pay off its creditors – by offering them an unspecified amount somewhere between almost zero and actually zero and expecting them to willingly agree to the deal even when one of them is the nation’s taxman – suddenly doesn’t seem all that insane by comparison.
EDIT 5.05pm
As we were writing the post above, the whole thing got roughly 128.6 times more complicated as Rangers won their Court Of Session appeal against the SFA’s imposition of a 12-month player-registration ban for bringing the game into disrepute. The surprise verdict will see the case returned to the SFA’s judicial panel for reconsideration, having found that the specific sanction it had applied was unlawful.
We’re not even going to start on the potentially massive ramifications of the judgement between the SFA and FIFA – which imposes strict rules on all national associations explicitly forbidding them from allowing clubs to involve courts of law in disputes – because our head’s spinning already. What matters in the narrower sense (ie purely in the parochial matter of Rangers) is what the SFA do next.
The punishments available to the judicial panel are now limited to those expressly laid down in the SFA’s articles of association, and break down as follows:
1. Fine (maximum £100,000)
2. Expulsion from Scottish Cup
3. Suspension from all competitions for a specified period.
4. Suspension or permanent expulsion from the Association itself, effectively the same thing as (3).
Alert readers will of course have realised that there’s very little point in imposing a financial penalty on a club with no money, which is in administration and currently offering to pay creditors a maximum of 5p in the £ (see above), meaning the fine would effectively amount to £5,000 at the most. (Also, as the SFA originally imposed a discretionary higher fine of £160,000, the stipulated maximum would in fact be a significant decrease of their punishment.)
In any event, after the coruscating “Note Of Reasons” the SFA published in advance of the panel’s appeal judgement, laying out in forensic and devastating detail the gravity of the offences (which were deemed only just short of match-fixing in seriousness), a piddling fine would make the SFA a laughing stock (and probably enrage FIFA further, with potentially terrible consequences for the entirety of Scottish football).
Article 65.5 of the SFA’s rulebook states the following:
“The fact of membership of the SFA shall constitute an agreement by a member of it 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.”
Rangers’ actions are clearly a flagrant breach of this rule over and above the severity of its original offences, so it looks inevitable that in addition to being banned from European competition for three years, Rangers will be out of at least one other competition too for an indeterminate amount of time. This, of course, will damage the financial prospects of any newco club and affect the willingness of Charles Green’s consortium to invest in the club. “The plot thickens” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
EDIT 6.06pm
On closer examination, Rangers’ victory in the Court of Session looks more and more like a suicidally Pyrrhic one. It places the SFA in a near-impossible position: if it accepts the court’s judgement by returning the appeal to the judicial panel, then regardless of the panel’s revised punishment the SFA will be pulverised by FIFA for breaking a rule the international association takes more seriously than almost any other – that of allowing law courts to interfere in football matters. All Scottish teams, including not just Rangers but ALL clubs AND the national team, might well find itself banned from all FIFA (and UEFA) competitions.
Essentially, the ruling has painted the SFA into a corner from which there is only one way out – take the judicial panel out of the equation entirely, by leaping over its head and separately expelling Rangers from the Association for their clear breach of Article 65.5 (merely suspending them would only delay the problem at best, not solve it), thereby freeing the panel from the responsibility of making any judgement and so incurring FIFA’s wrath. Rangers just took an enormous gamble.
As pointed out, Green can meet Reagan all he wants. It’s not up to the SFA chief to make a decision on the punishment due. If Green wanted to ‘cut a deal’ he’d be better meeting with the appeal panel…. Which could be the Sunday Mail ‘exclusive’…
Dundee College 5-asides World Record attempt still going at 4am this morning (20 hours).
Score is:
598 – 667 to the Tangerines.
Proceeds go to raising funds for renewables in Kathmandu, but mainly for Dreamz4U
Last one from the same auhor which leads me to think he may not be so un-biased after all.
Why Scotland doesn’t need Rangers
Posted on February 15, 2012 by Rev. Stuart Campbell
Scottish politics seems to be having a wee holiday this week. The First Minister has a little chat with the Scottish Secretary over the referendum, deciding nothing, the Unionists demand “answers” to questions on a completely different subject, Jim Sillars witters on about something or other in yet another bitter rage about how well the SNP’s doing without him, and the Scotsman quietly admits that some of its previous scare stories (this time the ones about Scottish membership of the EU) were cobblers and hopes nobody notices. In other words, business as usual.
The reason everyone’s putting out a skeleton service operating on auto-pilot is, of course, that they’re all transfixed with the goings-on at Ibrox. And rightly so, because it’s an enormous story which reaches out and touches the entire population in a way that politics almost never does. For fans of Rangers, their entire world has fallen in. For fans of other clubs it’s either hilarious, or a time for rising above petty rivalries and showing solidarity with their fellow supporters, ie it’s secretly hilarious. For Rangers employees it’s a worry, for battered wives, social services and hard-pressed A&E staff it’s a blessing and for booze retailers it’s a catastrophe.
We also can’t ignore the possible political consequences. For decades Rangers FC has served as a weekly indoctrination service for the defenders of the Union – you can’t spend a large proportion of your leisure time waving Union Jacks and singing “Rule Britannia” with thousands of fellow loyal subjects of Her Majesty (she of the Revenue and Customs) without it having some sort of effect on your worldview.
But for the media, which for months on end has largely turned a blind eye to the scale of Rangers’ problems and left the blogosphere to pick up the slack, it’s a time of panic. If Rangers fall they’ll probably take half the circulation (and pagecount) of the Daily Record with them, and the tabloid media in general is desperate for the club to survive in something as close to its present form as possible.
So the story, told loudly and relentlessly, is that Scottish football couldn’t live by Celtic alone. Rangers, it’s insisted over and over, are vital to the continued health – nay, the very survival – of the domestic game. Their friendly, loveable fans, we hear, are the lifeblood of every other club in the league as they turn up twice a season to swell the stands and consume the Scotch pies and Bovril that pay the wages of the home side’s gangly centre-half. The TV riches that pour into SPL coffers would vanish too, without the juicy prize of four Old Firm games a year to tempt Sky into opening their gold-plated chequebook. All in all, take Rangers away and you might as well padlock the turnstiles from Inverness Caley Thistle to Queen Of The South and call it a day.
But is it true? No. It’s a load of balls.
This blog loves nothing more than a good delve in some stats, so we’ve been wading waist-deep in them this week. And the conclusion we’ve reached is that the collapse of Rangers would in all probability be the best thing to happen to Scottish football this century. Along with its Parkhead twin, the club is a giant vampire squid choking the Scottish game to death, and history strongly suggests that Scottish football can ONLY flourish if one or both of the Gruesome Twosome is in poor health.
Firstly, let’s look at some of the myths.
We’re told that the smaller clubs need the influx of cash generated by home games against the Old Firm every year. But how much is that really worth? Under the current SPL structure, there’s no guaranteed number of such fixtures each season. Aberdeen, for example, got just three last year (two against Rangers, one against Celtic), because they were in the bottom six of the league at the time of the “split”.
In season 2010/11, the Dons had an average attendance at Pittodrie of just under 9,000. For the three Old Firm games, the average attendance was 13,378. That’s 4,504 extra punters through the gates per match, or a total for the season of 13,512. In other words, having Rangers and Celtic come to visit was effectively worth the equivalent of about 1.5 extra home games a year. (1.52, if you want to be picky.)
Now, for a club on a tight budget like Aberdeen, 1.5 extra home games a season is a handy bit of cash. If we assume that the average spectator spends £40 on their ticket, programme, refreshments and whatnot, it’s over half a million quid in (gross) revenue. But it’s not the difference between life and death. It could be achieved just as easily by an extended cup run or qualification for Europe – things which are significantly more likely to happen if you take one or both of the Old Firm out of the picture.
Indeed, just a modest amount of progress in Europe can effortlessly eclipse a season’s worth of Rangers and Celtic ties. In season 2007/08 Aberdeen reached the last 32 of the Europa League, which is very much the poor relation of UEFA’s club competitions compared to the cash cow of the Champions’ League. Getting to the last 32 of it isn’t exactly spectacular success, but it nevertheless brought the Dons four extra home games that season, which drew a total of 74,767 paying customers.
Alert viewers will have noticed that even this humble adventure was therefore worth almost SIX TIMES as much to the Pittodrie club as an entire season of Old Firm fixtures, and that’s before you factor in the not-inconsiderable matter of extra TV money and participation bonuses, which would surely boost that multiplier to 10 or more. (It’s perhaps also worth noting that even the first-round first-leg tie against the unglamorous FC Dnipro of Ukraine attracted a larger crowd than any of 2010/11′s games against Rangers or Celtic, despite having thousands fewer away fans.)
From this we can see that if a team like Aberdeen qualified for Europe just fractionally more often, as as result of the demise of one or both of the Old Firm making places more easily attainable – maybe once every five or six years – the rewards could easily eclipse the losses. But there’s more to it than that, because the Europa League jaunt had a knock-on effect on domestic attendances too.
When Hearts came to Pittodrie in the middle of the Europa run, the gate was 14,000. The corresponding fixture in 2010/11, at roughly the same time of year, saw just 9,100 show up. In other words, a tiny glimpse of success saw attendance over 50% higher – exactly the same sort of boost delivered in a normal season by the visits of the Old Firm. Even two months after the Dons were knocked out of the tournament by Bayern Munich, a home game against Falkirk could pull a crowd of 11,484 – a comparable late-season match (vs Hibernian) in 2010/11 managed just 7,400.
Of course, you could argue that the higher attendances in 2007/08 were a result of a better season in general (Aberdeen finished 4th that year, compared to 9th in 2011). But then, that’s the point – fans are much more likely to turn up to watch games in a competition where their team has a fighting chance of achieving something than in a league where they’re just making up the numbers. Take one or both of the Old Firm out of the league and you instantly make it far more competitive, which makes it far more exciting, which makes it far more attractive for people to come and watch.
This isn’t just an idle theory. Within living memory, Scottish football has actually experienced an extended period where one or other of the Old Firm was in dire straits, and the result was a far more competitive league with substantially bigger attendances for the non-OF clubs. While this era is often dismissed as a brief Alex-Ferguson-inspired flicker in the mid-80s, it in fact lasted for almost 20 years.
The first phase was around the creation of the old Scottish Premier Division, running from the tail end of the 1970s and right through the 1980s, before David Murray and his bottomless wallet turned up at Ibrox around the turn of the decade. Rangers were in a woeful state at the time, winning the league just once in a 10-season spell between 1979 and 1988, and with home crowds at Ibrox regularly dropping below 10,000.
(One 1979 league game against Partick Thistle brought fewer than 2,000 loyal Gers fans to the stadium, and no, that’s not a typo – we really mean TWO thousand.)
But it wasn’t just Celtic who took advantage – in four of the other nine seasons of that decade the league title went to the smaller clubs (Aberdeen three times, Dundee Utd once), and it would have been five if not for the most infamous last-day implosion in Scottish football history robbing Hearts of the 1985/86 flag.
In other words, in a 10-team division fully 50% of the participants were mounting realistic challenges for the title – a feat probably never replicated anywhere else in the world in the history of football. The Scottish Premier Division was almost certainly the most competitive club league on the face of the planet, and such a healthy state of affairs was reflected on the broader stage.
Aberdeen won the European Cup-Winners’ Cup (with an all-Scottish team) in 1983, defeating Bayern Munich and Real Madrid to secure the trophy, and also beat that year’s European Cup champions SV Hamburg to join the illustrious list of winners of the Super Cup. The next season Dundee United got to the semi-final of the European Cup (with the Dons making the Cup-Winners’ Cup semis), and three years later Jim McLean’s men reached the final of the UEFA Cup, knocking out Barcelona along the way but losing the final 2-1 to IFK Goteborg.
The nature of Old Firm weakness changed between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. David Murray had arrived at Rangers and was pouring money into the club, attracting big-name England internationals with the promise of European competition after English clubs were banned in the aftermath of Heysel. But while Rangers grew stronger Celtic weakened, and the Parkhead side hovered on the brink of bankruptcy for several years before being rescued by Fergus McCann in 1994.
As a result, the Scottish Premier Division remained competitive. Although that sounds a daft assertion in the wake of Rangers’ nine-in-a-row of league triumphs (1989-97), the fact remains that four different teams finished in second place over the period, with Celtic not managing to do it until 1996. Rangers’ average margin of victory in the league race during the nine-season run was under 7 points, which contrasts sharply with the typical modern-day gap between the Old Firm and the rest of 30+ points.
Indeed, over the entire 22-season lifespan of the old Premier Division, the Old Firm (in either order) took the top two spots just seven times, and five of those comprised the first two and last three seasons of the competition. Over a 17-year stretch in between, the Old Firm secured the 1 and 2 positions just twice. (Celtic-Rangers in 1978/79, and Rangers/Celtic in 1986/87.) Close to half the time – nine seasons from the 22 – the Old Firm couldn’t even both get into the top 3.
The SPL era, on the other hand, has seen Tweedlehun and Tweedlydee cosily slice up first and second place in 12 of its 13 seasons (the only blip being Hearts pipping Rangers to the runner-up spot by a single point in 2005/06). Where the Scottish Premier Division was the most competitive league in the world, the SPL is now the least competitive, and therefore one of the least healthy.
(During the life of the old SPD the Scotland international side qualified for World Cups in 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1998, and for European Championships in 1992 and 1996. Since the advent of the SPL in 1999, with the Old Firm hurling most of their money at foreign players, the national side hasn’t reached a single tournament finals.)
Of course, the game has changed since the Premier Division. The SPL, Sky TV, Champions League and Bosman have all conspired – entirely by design – to make life harder for the smaller teams and cement the dominance of the bigger ones who can command higher TV audiences. Even this, though, is a slightly misleading picture.
Media pundits are fond of pointing out that Sky’s interest in the SPL would plummet if it no longer had Old Firm games to offer its subscribers, and this is undoubtedly true. What nobody points out, however, is that the OF hog so much of the Sky money for themselves that even a massively-reduced deal from terrestrial broadcasters would be more evenly distributed in a notional post-Rangers world, and so would likely end up with the smaller teams seeing fairly similar amounts of money to what they get now.
By way of illustration of the sort of sums involved, we examined the 2010 public accounts of Motherwell, who finished 6th in the SPL in 2010/11. Their total income from TV and radio was just over £1.2m. The bulk of that will have come from the Sky deal, but some will also be from elsewhere, eg the BBC rights to highlights packages and radio coverage. Arbitrarily, then, let’s say Sky is worth £1m a year to Motherwell.
A typical home game at the average 2010/11 Fir Park attendance of 5,660 will generate something very roughly in the region of £225,000. If Sky backed out and nobody took up the live-TV rights at all (the latter part being a highly unlikely scenario), the club would need to either play four extra home games OR attract an extra 1300 fans to each game to compensate, OR reduce its annual wage bill of a startling £3.3m, or some combination of the three.
In a more competitive league with more chance of European football and an increased likelihood of cup runs, that’s hardly an impossible dream – for reference, in 2007/08 when Motherwell finished 3rd their average attendance was around 1000 higher, at 6,600. The further 300 extra was achieved as recently as 2004/05.
And all that’s without considering extra prize money. The SPL’s current structure awards the team finishing 3rd in the league 9.5% of the organisation’s “Net Commercial Revenues” – ie all sponsorship money including, but not limited to, TV receipts. The team finishing second sees that sum boosted hugely, to 15%.
For perspective, that jump from 3rd to 2nd is by far the biggest gap between any positions in the league, at 5.5%. (Payouts are very roughly £2.5m for 2nd and £1.6m for 3rd, a drop in cash terms of around £900,000.) By comparison the gap between 3rd and 4th is only 1% and each subsequent place 0.5% less, so the drop between 3rd and the team relegated all the way down in 12th place is just 5%.
The difference between 2nd and 1st, however, is a mere 2%. It’s almost as if the structure was deliberately designed to ensure that the top two teams got the lion’s share of the money regardless of which order they finished in, neither ever benefitting massively over the other, while the rest fell further and further behind every year.
Without Rangers, whoever finishes second will get a whopping cash injection – though without Sky it would obviously be substantially less than the current £900,000 – even before they play a single game in Europe. (And in the SPL’s 13-year history, SEVEN different clubs have occupied the “best of the rest” spot in the final league table. The bounty would be shared around.)
But even beyond that, the data in the early part of this feature (which is broadly reflected for all other Scottish sides, not just Aberdeen, but we’d be here all day if we were to list every one) proves that the crucial core principle remains the same – a team with a better chance of even the mildest definition of success, eg qualifying for Europe or reaching a domestic cup final, will see a large upshoot in its attendance figures, and more than enough to compensate for the less-frequent visits of Rangers/Celtic fans or a drop in TV money. And the prime driver of that increased prospect of success is the weakness (or absence) of at least one of the Old Firm.
For all the commentators asserting that Scottish football would collapse – either in footballing terms or economic ones – should Rangers FC not make it out of season 2011/12 alive, the numbers simply don’t add up.
macjay1
When JockStein was replaced as manager in 78 there didn’t seem to be a great outcry from the fans, or was there?
optimistic little soldier on 2 June, 2012 at 09:26 said:
Ally will be happy if they name the panel before hand so he can’t get the big boys doon to sort them out.
sixtaeseven: No NewClub in SPL and it’s Non-Negotiable!:
Off the top of my head I could not give you a categoric figure but 30 million seems to ring a bell.
Paul67 could tell you and if he is not about it is in the Celtic audited accounts which I don’t have to hand.
kitalba, thanks
So at best that’s roughly what Rankers books should have been showing in recent years – not the £100 000 000.
Their books are cooked — or should I say over-cooked!
Gordon smith on rangers – i love the club. < that would kind of skew your impartially in your role as sfa chief exec.
These people have no shame.
1/6 / 12 .
Italy 0 —— Russia 3 [ + the 4 sitters they missed in the first 45 ]
Can’t remember seeing a worse Italian team.
Totally disinterested. Rank . Seriously bad defending . .
Jeered at the end .
Slated by the TV pundits. . Slated by the football newspapers..
Warm and sunny [ 90 Degrees -real thing summer is on its way ] way down south
South Of Tunis on 2 June, 2012 at 09:42 said:
I was thinking of backing them lol.
Why do people on here believe anything that is printed in the Daily Ranger or the Hunday Mason????!!
Where is the Silver Bullet and when is it going to be delivered?
Die, die, die, die, die, die!
Maryhopkinscsc
Interesting that John Yorkston breaks ranks this morning finally seeing the light? Next it will be Michael Johnston! Aye right…..
So the much heralded CVA gets maybe 5p in the £ for creditors and if it fails the only people that get paid are Duff and Duffer!
Its a scandal of huge proportions and if Green meets with Regan to “do a deal” then FIFA will step in for sure, cannot happen, MSM PR at its worst.
Expel them from football for a year, rebuild the game from within.
We don’t need no stinkin’ Rangers!
Hail Hail!
RobinBhoy
Kevtic on 2 June, 2012 at 09:30 said:
Kevtic
Can`t speak for others,but my recollection is that his car accident,when Sean Fallon took over the reins temporarily,was seen to have been the time of change for big Jock and,sadly, a reassessment of his ability,although he still had a significant part to play in guiding the Scottish team.
Mate,he was a giant.
Kitalba
He has a very similar style to an etims writer
hh
charles green snotter machine speaks to mccoist. McCoist says we could prob take a 6 month ban and a ban from the cup. Effectively that means no transfer this summer. The cup is just a side issue to them. Such is their arrogance they probably expect to still compete come January.
This is like watching weekend at Bernies. Only Bernie died 3 months ago. I’m enjoying the havering.
Duff & Phelps
Hail! Hail! PMTYH. ;-)
I read Jackson’s piece posted by Kitalba and I think I’ve worked him out. He yearns for the glory days of private jets and swoops and Jersey retreats. Therefore every morning he has to cheer himself up, facts don’t matter, as long as it makes him feel good for a few hours. Today he uses two of his favourite words ‘pumping’ and ‘millions,’ just like the days of yore.
Today he can suspend reality for a few hours and he’s probably got a wee street party to go to, that will keep the feel good factor going. Freddy Shepherd…dearie me! Sports journalist of the year-now that is a laugh!
roy croppie on 2 June, 2012 at 09:20 said:
With twenty orange parades in Glasgow today and the council funding their parties they are doing what they do best…screwing the tax payer
Roy 2 in Glasgow today, 20 tomorrow, so Sunday is the real day to avoid them…..thankfully I have no need to cross their path tomorrow…..and apart from Council funding, who is paying for the Police prescence and the clean up??
The CVA will be rejected. The only question is when.
Now there has been a lot of discussion about what would then happen with clause 4.23. That’s the one that says: ” … Sevco is contractually obliged to purchase the business and assets of the Company for £5,500,000 by 30 July 2012.”
Now to a non-lawyer like me, “contractually obligated” sounds like a done deal. And that raises two questions. Are D&P empowered to make such a deal in advance of liquidation – there is no certainty that they will actually be the liquidators. And is the obligation a two way one – does it mean done deal or does it mean that Sevco is obliged to offer £5.5M but the liquidator can accept a higher bid if there is one?
(The conspiracy theorists could then see Green as another stalking horse. His role is to take the club from Whyte, liquidate it and then let another bidder trump him with a bid just over £5.5M. The 79th return of the Blue Knights anyone?)
Note also that the deal is not just for the assets. It states “business and assets”. That makes it sound like Sevco would purchase not only property but everything else as well. So would it really be a liquidation? Is this not an attempt to take over everything and leave the debts – remember Bill Miller’s split of good and bad?
And is this strictly legal? If Sevco buys the assets in a liquidation, fine. The money raised goes to the creditors. But if it buys the business how can it leave the business debts behind?
Do you think any of the Flute ‘n Mouth bands will be performing on the stage at the concert outside Buck House?
EPL Free Transfer List
ARSENAL
Manuel Almunia, Gavin Hoyte
ASTON VILLA
Carlos Cuellar, Emile Heskey, Brad Guzan
BLACKBURN ROVERS
Vincenzo Grella, Michel Salgado
BOLTON WANDERERS
Robbie Blake, Sean Davis, Ricardo Gardner, Jussi Jaaskelainen, Ivan Klasnic, Zat Knight, Paul Robinson, Gretar Steinsson
CHELSEA
Jose Bosingwa, Didier Drogba, Salomon Kalou
EVERTON
Marcus Hahnemann. James McFadden
FULHAM
Andrew Johnson. Danny Murphy, Bjorn Helge Riise
LIVERPOOL
Fabio Aurelio, Stephen Darby
MANCHESTER CITY
Gai Assulin, Owen Hargreaves, Andreas Mancini, Gunnar Nielsen, Stuart Taylor
MANCHESTER UNITED
Tomasz Kuszczak, Michael Owen
NEWCASTLE UNITED
Danny Guthrie, Tamas Kadar, Peter Lovenkrands, Alan Smith
NORWICH CITY
Zak Whitbread, Aaron Wilbraham
QPR
Patrick Agyemang, Gary Borrowdale, Akos Buzsaky, Radek Cerny, Lee Cook, Danny Gabbidon, Fitz Hall, Clint Hill, Peter Ramage, Dan Shittu, Rowan Vine
STOKE CITY
Salif Diao, Ricardo Fuller, Tom Soares
SUNDERLAND
Craig Gordon, Lewis King
SWANSEA CITY
Ferrie Bodde
TOTTENHAM
Ben Alnwick, Ledley King, Ryan Nelsen, Louis Saha
WEST BROM
Keith Andrews, Marton Fulop, Joe Mattock, Paul Scharner, Nicky Shorey, Somen Tchoyi
WIGAN
Mohamed Diame, Steve Gohouri, Chris Kirkland, Mike Pollitt, Hugo Rodallega
WOLVES
Jody Craddock
Lot of good players there, if we’re after a keeper, Craig Gordon, an experienced centre half Ryan Nelson or Carlos Cuellar, a striker Hugo Rodallega (we can dream) or Ivan Klasnic.
Sorry if this shoite has already been posted ……I am absolutely raging…… Who the hell do the orcs think they are…… THEY’RE offering the SFA a COMPROMISE…..!!?? …….
They are beyond an embarrassment to Scottish Football ….. And the SFA had better sort them out NOW..
THEY TOOK THIS TO COURT, AND THEY KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE DOING…… THEY REALLY DO THINK THEY HAVE SCOTTISH FOOTBALL AT THEIR MERCY …… We need to watch developments on this one VERY CLOSELY………
DAILY RANGER
Rangers in crisis: Ibrox club set to cut deal with SFA to stop Scottish football from sliding into abyss
Jun 2 2012 by David McCarthy
RANGERS and the SFA are ready to cut a deal to stop the Scottish game from sliding into the abyss.
Record Sport understands Charles Green, whose group has launched a CVA aimed at hauling Rangers out of administration, has made contact with SFA chief executive Stewart Regan in a bid to come up with a face-saving solution for both parties.
Green is believed to be furious with Ibrox administrators Duff & Phelps for launching the Court of Session case against the SFA that unleashed the full fury of FIFA on both the club and the national association.
FIFA has ordered the SFA to haul Rangers into line or face the prospect of being banned from the World Cup qualifiers and seeing their club sides kicked out of Europe. That means the SFA are seriously considering expelling or suspending Rangers’ membership – a move that would create chaos within the Scottish game.
Expulsion would effectively kill off the Ibrox club, while suspension would create problems as Rangers’ fixtures during their ‘ban’ would result in their opponents being awarded three points.
That would lead to accusations of unfairness from the clubs who would play Rangers when their suspension was lifted, with more chaos inevitable.
Green met with Gers boss Ally McCoist at Ibrox yesterday and it is believed they are keen to offer the SFA a compromise.
One avenue open to the club is to accept a Scottish Cup ban AND offer the SFA a ‘get-out’ to appease FIFA by offering to take a six-month transfer embargo.
The decision of the SFA’s Independent Judicial panel to impose a 12-month ban on transfers, later upheld by an appeals panel, triggered the crisis. Rangers took the case to the Court of Session, which ruled the SFA had no right to impose such a penalty.
Lord Glennie ordered the case back to the appeals panel, which now has to impose one of the sanctions open to it.
Those include kicking Rangers out of the Scottish Cup – a punishment the original panel deemed too lenient – and suspending or expelling their membership of the SFA.
The latter punishments were considered to be too harsh and problematic for the Scottish game as a whole but with FIFA hovering menacingly over the SFA, those options are now being examined.
However, a Rangers offer to cop a six-month transfer ban could allow both parties the chance to step back from the brink.
It would mean the club could avoid the risk of being suspended – which would seriously affect their chances of surviving in the SPL next term – or expelled.
It would also give the SFA the chance to get FIFA off its back.
Re the top level shennanigans to save R@ngers ,funding of OO parties etc.
You see, Alex Salmond was right………Orangeism, WATP ness , this IS the fabric of Scottish society. We are just an annoying, unwelcome bit of fluff on the fabric.
Magnificentseven
thanks for the info mate. Had planned a day around the house tomorrow anyway. Once again we’ll all pick up the tab for the state funded bigotry
Do the Huns have to pay PAYE and NI on deferred wages? I thought they would have to as deferment isn’t a pay cut just a delay.
Also I thought the Huns were already suspended from the Scottish Cup this season as they failed to pay Dundee Utd ticket money on time.
I would take all positives for the Huns in the press with a pinch of salt. This is a club who could spend years in court as everything they do penalises creditors and football’s governing bodies.
Glendalystonsils likes a mr whippy with his lime green jelly on 2 June, 2012 at 10:00 said:
Exactly but they need to understand we ain’t going away and they don’t like it.
They know things are changing and they don’t like it 1 bit.
67Heaven … I am Neil Lennon..!!..Truth and Justice will always prevail on 2 June:
Take a deep breath.
The story is nonsense and not worth getting upset about.
Sounds like panic is starting to set in with Team Green. A Scottish Cup “ejection” is unlikely to satisfy the independent panel (or FIFA), leaving only various degrees of breakages in RFC’s membership of the SFA… And this is before FIFA demands action fro taking the case to civil court in the first place…
And, in an act of divine poetry, their decision to go to court has returned a verdict which makes it impossible for RFC to “do a deal” with their mates in the SFA.
In effect, they have destroyed their cosy arrangement with the governing body, and have invited the FIFA wolf to the door (it will take its place next to the 10,000lb gorilla). And, to make matters worse, previously friendly minions like Yorkston and Gilmour are furious that their precious Scottish National Team has been put in the firing line. RFC’s allies for future battles against the rules, have dwindled.
Now Green, in an “astounded of forehead” moment, realises that RFC and D&P have potentially destroyed his little plan to snatch millions of pounds worth of property and intellectual assets for a pittance.
But he has no way out. The days of backroom deals are over. The only option now is for RFC to at last feel the full force of pure justice.
annual report for year end june 2010 shows property plant and equipment at £56,689…
wonder what I did with 2011 report?..
back to sleep….
South of Tunis 9.42
Buongiorno,
that`s not so good! Who can I support in the Euros? It may be a tournament too far for La Roja.
Whit the divil does this mean (from the article posted above)
…. suspension would create problems as Rangers’ fixtures during their ‘ban’ would result in their opponents being awarded three points.
That would lead to accusations of unfairness from the clubs who would play Rangers when their suspension was lifted, with more chaos inevitable..
What? Are they considering a suspension for PART of a season? How can they possibly do that? For exactly the reasons given above a part season ban or suspension is absurd.