This evening’s announcement by Dunfermline Athletic that they no longer expect to receive timely receipt of the £80,000 ticket money Rangers FC PLC (in administration) owe them will heighten concerns at Inverness Caledonian Thistle, who have a stock at tickets with Rangers right now, money for which will be received by the administrators in advance of their game later this month.
The administrators have yet to decide whether to retain high-earning players or make more funds available for existing creditors, and future creditors, like Inverness. As ticket sales for the Inverness game are on-going, the administrators will need to be aware of their legal position before retaining a premium squad.
One final push (this week) for the Vanessa Riddle Appeal. We have a Celtic top signed by the first team squad available to auction on eBay. You can bid on the auction and help send Vanessa for the treatment she needs by clicking here. Thanks to Penfold for the donation and to Taggsybhoy for organising (yet again).
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McFall compares the huns’ situation to Northern Rock
So Salmond is quite willing to ignore criminality???
John McFall on BBC Newsnight – ‘the country deserves full transparency’.
Rangers Fans want ANSWERS..
so here goes –
LIQUIDATION
now, what was the question?
Since 1997, Rangers have spent £168M more than they have earned, of which more than £60m remains as unpaid legacy debt on the Murray Group balance sheet owed to Bank of Scotland.
During this period they hatched 2 (that we know of) tax scams that resulted in Rangers saving £50M on payroll costs.
In the past 8 months alone, Rangers have withheld a further £9M of VAT and payroll tax.
Rangers’ benefits from tax evasion each year exceed the total wage bill of every other club in the SPL bar Celtic.
In 2010, with tax bill in hand, the Rangers board were in a position to act to save the club. They simply needed to sell some first team players, run the club at a profit on domestic revenue, and bank the Champions League cash.
They would have a ring fenced cash pool of around £40M, would be profitable, and would own their stadium. They would have been able to pay the bill if the Tax Tribunal returned a decision against them. They would not be in Administration today. They chose not to. They chose to sign Jelavic. They chose to run beyond their means again. They chose.
They made that choice fully cognisant of the clear and present risk faced by the club as a result of their reckless and (likely) unlawful strategies stretching back over 15 years. They chose in full knowledge that the major shareholder – Murray Group – had collapsed and was now balance sheet insolvent. There was no queue of buyers at the door, and no one inside the club with the wherewithal to dig them out. They chose.
As it is, Whyte since has compounded their folly, and they are now likely to be liquidated whether they win the tax case or not. (an outcome that would be absurdly funny)
Rangers owe HMRC around £60M. They declared a further £67M of creditors in their unaudited accounts to end June 2011. In the intervening period they have been trading insolvently according to their Administrator, using Payroll tax deducted from staff, VAT collected from customers and extending trade creditors to sustain their cost base.
All of the above is a matter of public record and can be verified and demonstrated.
If Alex Salmond cuts a deal that offsets Scottish block grant or other budget income in exchange for HMRC forgiving Rangers’ tax evasion, how will you vote in the referendum?
Just curious like.
What a wheeze it would be if Dinglewalls
Fans NewCo was funded by an EiS
HMRC stuffed at the end but subsidising the new begining.
Our politicians would just love the inclusiveness of it all.
Or maybe Salmond will find some cash through a Timmy Tax on Catholics
That might buy a few orangemen off.
Possibilities Possibilities
67heaven
Sorry mate, haven’t lived in Scotland for many years. Had the impression that jails had higher building and maintenance standards – paid for by taxes!
Still a good idea, though.
Cheers
Alex
Did i hear right? They could tempt HMRC with money gained from European games?
So now they are asking Uefa to turn a blind eye on their rules as well, astonishing
I don’t care if someone buys the huns and makes them world beaters.
As long as they pay their dues, and are then run in a fair and honest way, fine.
In the mean time, strip them of every tainted trophy they have stolen.
Mc Fall = souptaker!!!
David Hughes (@DavietheDJ)
Posted Wednesday 15th February 2012 from Twitlonger
I can confirm that the head of hibs supporters clubs has contacted Celtic supporters affiliation to say they are going to join in the party on Sunday to celebrate the huns (and wee huns) goin down the pan.
They will be giving all their fans streamers and balloons etc… to make the party atmosphere
Jelly & Ice Cream oan the last train hame.
Jelly & Ice Cream oan the last train hame.
MWD
What on earth was McFall trying to say there? The government should help them out? What?
FCB
Spot on. Them red stars always got on my T*Ts!!
So Lord McFall thinks the “Scottish Goevernment should hold their hands” over the next few months to ensure hey come out with a good business model – This truely is the best wee country……
I have read everything that has been written on here in the last few days (in fact, my appetite for all things hun related almost made me buy the Record today, almost!) but have been unable to post due to the fact that my sides have split in laughter.
On my road to recovery, i would draw your attention to the excellent Scots Law Thoughts blog which gives some legal opinion on the administrative event friend our poor, downtrodden neighbours at Rangers Football Club Ltd (In Administration) are experiencing: Scots Law Thoughts
It does appear to contradict the positivity emanating from Ibroke today. I know who i believe!
PS Alex Salmon is a muppet, and John Yorkston isn’t far behind him.
You think you’ve seen it all then you get a gala performance of the second raters falling over themselves to enter pleas of mitigation on the huns’ behalf – Nicola Sturgeon, Shona Robison, La Curran, the ineffable Spiers etc., etc..
Tonight fat Salmond got his big fat death in the family face all over the telly urging leniency.
Which of these nonenities stepped up to the plate when we were going bust?
You’ve got to pinch yourself and ask – what’s so special about Rangers? Why is the public being encouraged to believe that the huns are so exceptional that they should not suffer the legal consequences of their wrong-doing?
If you ever forget you’re a minority the Scottish establishment will always be there to remind you.
HECTOR – Moonbeams WD. Kano 1000 \o/ Supporting Neil Lennon 100%. says:
15 February, 2012 at 23:12
Jelly & Ice Cream oan the last train hame.
Jelly & Ice Cream oan the last train hame.
with BlackPudding no doubt
Judge: I’m sorry Mr Mouse, I can’t grant a divorce based on your partner’s buck teeth
Mickey Mouse: I said she was F$$king Goofy!!!
“Nein-In-A-Row…………Hollow, Hollow”
:)
Nichty-nicht!
Our hero Craig Whyte on ITV2 right now! :)
What is clear from pretty much every discussion is the establishment view that the needs of Rangers FC PLC (in administraion) are all that counts.
Screw the tqaxpayers, the clubs they owe money to and all of the other creditors. The survival of this toxic, noxious bunch of tax cheats is what really matters.
would uefa not intervene if there was government involvement at club level
I would never support snp as it frightens me being a catholic in a independent snp Scotland. the rhetoric I have heard in last 24 hours hasn’t.changed that view
Ghuy on the seat across from me is greeting.
Embdy think he’s a Hun.
Maybe he’s A. Dick.
MWD :-))) no jokin BTW
Think I might give him a consoletary HUDDLE.
TBB
Brill!! Send that to Salmond and mc fell!!
MWD
Fandan :-))
We’re doing the HUDDLE when Rangers die.
Doing the huddle when Rangers die.
MWD
Just watched STV and Newsnight.
If Grand Master Suck is the best they can muster, dearie, dearie me.
I was a bit perturbed by McFaull saying the government should hold their hands, they are thiefs, cheats, liers, conmen and fraudsters, they should be in the jail, nobody should be mollycoddling them.
If I were king, it would be off with their heads.
Co x trades and fails to pay taxes of at least £9m.
Co x trades and faces the possibility that a tax avoidance scheme it set up and which saved its employees millions of pounds over years is declared illegal leaving it open to recovery of tens of millions of pounds.
Co x goes into administration leaving employees and suppliers facing ruin.
Within 24 hours of administration former employees of co X ,many of whom may have benefitted from that tax avoidance scheme and public figures , some of them disgraced , are given public air time to promote the idea of refloating Co x as quickly and painlessly as possible with no condemnation of its practices or its failure to pay to the severely stretched public purse.
I am dreaming , arent I?
SOAL
Black Pudding is awe done.
HT. Your just jealous your no sittin across fae the A. Dick greeting cause his BIG HOOS is shutting doon.
MWD
GL2 has a point, they all seem to be fallin over themselves to offer platitudes for outright thievery
All parties seem to have calculated the same – the electorate sympathetic to them is larger the one against. In Scottish terms, and purely them against us, they’re right. Other clubs are going to have to step up to the plate. The contact from Hibs is encouraging, but its going to need more.
The agenda seems to be ‘a big boy done it and ran away’ now can you just give us our ball back and we can resume the cheating.
Mc Fall, Reid and co wanted to bomb the House of Lords now they take the 40 scum pieces of cow patt!!
lochgoilhead bhoy says:
15 February, 2012 at 22:42
ernie lynch says:
15 February, 2012 at 19:21
‘Sorry I was out so couldn’t reply to your earlier obnoxious remarks.
I’m also sorry you don’t get it. Are you naturally daft or have you worked at it?
For 2 days there has been no mention of tax from politicians (n.b. only Labour and SNP have commented). The whole talk has been “for the good of Scottish Football” or “we must protect the 200 jobs” or “Rangers must survive”.
The agenda needs to change thicko. The truth needs to get out that they have been diddling tax. The more that is talked about the better whether the tax is repaid or not.’
####
You sound rattled.
I can’t imagine why.
.
Courtesy Wings over Scotland..
Why Scotland doesn’t need Rangers
Posted on February 15, 2012 by RevStu
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 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 other 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.) In nine of the 22 seasons, 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 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. We’d imagine the bulk of that came 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, out of the total £16m that Sky pay the SPL every year.
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 disappeared and nobody took up the live-TV rights at all, 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, 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.
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
Summa
McFall was embarassing,and generalising the issue in the worst possible way.
MWD
It wasn’t the guy sitting opposite that I was referring to ! :-)
if anybody can tell me what john Mcfall was going on about it would be really appreciated