Craig Whyte laid out Rangers finances in a statement today, released in response to the Daily Record’s series of articles on the club this morning. Whyte explained Rangers operating costs are around £45m while their income is approximately £35m, adding that the club needs to “live within its means”.
He confirmed the central allegation from the Record, that Rangers have securitised income from future season ticket sales in order to provide money for the club to pay its current costs, while denying they owe £5m VAT.
I have refreshed the page several times since an initially read and see no attempt to address the glaring question, if Rangers are spending tomorrow’s income today, what happens tomorrow? It beggars belief that someone thought it was a good idea to confirm a fact like without addressing the enormous question now hanging over the club.
Maybe an octopus ate Craig’s homework.
I’ve no idea how much money Rangers have in the bank right now, at this time on transfer deadline day, no one even seems to know if they have sold prize-asset, Jelavic, to Everton, but no matter how much of the securitised income remains, if this is not a dead parrot, it’s in severely poor health.
More power to you, Craig. I’ll not have a word said against you.
991 Comments- Pages:
- «
- 1
- ...
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- »
Is it today the teddy bears have their picnic
Listened to Clyde last night,honestly don’t know why it causes such a laugh on here,listening to Darryl King continually repeat the only part of the whole financial saga he understands at the midden about the ticket deal in his put on speaking properly voice bit not saying very much at all,the complete and utter rudeness of Mark Guidi jumping down callers throats who question the lack of journalism attached to the Scottish media when its as plain as day they just didn’t want to report negativity about the huns in order to keep their customer base reading and listening coupled with the fact the vast majority of the msm are huns anyway and that they don’t know any different to dancing to the huns tune.
Celtic bloggers have been talking about it for years,all the msm had to do was investigate and report in such a way as not to leave themselves open,its not hard.
I also find it hard to stomach how the huns in the press and beyond have this ‘we’ve been conned” mentality now,King kept talking about the downsizing at the huns since McLeish,that should’ve told them long ago money was a big issue but still they expected the best players in Scotland and success,this rubbish about Walter Smith only having stuck it out,like Ally because of being dyed in the wool huns is laughable given the amount of money he spent.
Know something,I feel sorry for David Murray,he was just a bit of an idiot used by the huns for his influence,the blame for all this lies with the support and the managers who built their teams,they deserve no sympathy and all they get.
Did you know?
That Rangers squad STILL cost more than Celtics in transfer fees even after the Jellyman went the way of the Octopus. Don’t let them rewrite history.
Thoughts for Reamonn and his family and friends.
HH
TLK
Re: The comedy gold phone-in’s over the past few nights…..
I know that its a great laught to stick it right into the huns/media etc but, I think the most important point of all was made by Speirs the other night there on Clyde when, with his back to the wall…the hun inside him came out to play as he pleaded -” the government won’t allow Rankers to go to the wall!!!”
Now, either Speirs already knows where the tunnels have been dug or, when the digging will begin ?mmm
I have said on here on numerous occasions that – Scotland IS the huns, the huns ARE Scotland!
Sad but, true! IMO!
Hail! Hail!
BBC headline today demonstrates the short comings of sans serif fonts with:
‘lll Pandas both taken off display’
Confused me I can tell you.
laught = laugh
Modren sans serif fonts is rubbish.
There is one major point I have not seen the DR or any other media outlet approach as yet.
Even if they win the tax case Whyte has killed them. There is now officially no way out.
When I say killed them I mean liquidation. There is no way they can now come out of administration with the income streams for 4 years mortgaged off. Whyte has guaranteed liquidation with this move, whatever happens with the tax case.
The dignified ones over Govan way? will they come out and condone Healy’s behaviour or will they let it go.
I await their response.
Well, it was a good transfer window for us. Must be no fun to wake up a hun this morning – not that it ever is really. And I’m sure many of them won’t have slept anyway.
So what would you do if you were the rookie manager of a failing football club? Your best striker has just been sold off and you were given no money to buy a replacement. You couldn’t even offer deals to trialists and were outbid by Hibs for one. Your squad list now fits onto a single sheet of paper and you know that the bench for future games will be filled with kids making up the numbers. And you know that it can only get worse.
Do you save what integrity you have and walk away, or stay on and try to achieve something despite the carnage all around you?
Celtic upped the offer for Molina by €500,000 last night but Betis were unwilling to sell (no time to get replacement). Ground hog day!
Bada Bing
Thanks for your thoughts, l will be fine.
Thanks
Mtt
Lucky Number 7-Its probably gossip mate,but he must be close to walking away.He will get a more sympathetic ear now that the lapdogs have finally got Whyte in their sights.
This has probably been mentioned before, I apologise if thats the case but, I have this theory that somehow…Murray has planted Whyte into Ibrokes to get, Murray’s £50 million back ?
I don’t know how to explain it but, I have that feeling about all of this.
Hail! Hail!
Beautiful day for us all… Thoughts and prayers for other members of the Celtic community..
Indeed the radio spin was lamentable..
Snyde…. Celtic LOSE OUT on 2 targets… Rangers miss Holt( cos they offered an I Tunes voucher!).,
So predictable….
But we don’t care..
Do we expect FPLG to quit today? His face was a treat coming out the dome last night
Murray has planted Whyte into Ibrokes to get, Murray’s £50 million back ?
Are you Declan?
Comedy gold.
QB
Best comedy moment on the ole Clyde phone-in last night was wee Darrell’s reaction to the mischievous caller who suggested that there was a strong business case for Celtic buying the remnants of post-liquidation Rangers with a view to using them as a feeder club in the lower leagues and using Ibrox as a training ground. Poor Darrell sounded as if he was ready to either explode or challenge the caller to a square-go there and then.
KevJungle says:
1 February, 2012 at 10:12
‘This has probably been mentioned before, I apologise if thats the case but, I have this theory that somehow…Murray has planted Whyte into Ibrokes to get, Murray’s £50 million back ?’
I think it’s more likely that Murray had no say whatsoever in the takeover and the whole thing was set up by the bank to protect their own interests.
Ho Ho
The bears are starting to wake up to the fact they will be paying TWICE for the purchase of the club.
Whyte borrows £24.4m from Ticketus. That money is deposited into his lawyers account an entire month prior to purchasing the club. A month.
So Rangers owe Ticketus £24.4m.
Now allegedly Whyte uses those funds (Whyte denies this) to pay £18m to Lloyds. He then says in his circular if there is not an insolvency event 90 days after the outcome of the tax case he will write this off otherwise this money is due to Wavetower.
So if Rangers lose the tax case they owe Ticketus £24.4m AND Wavetower £18m which means they will actually be paying £44.4m for that original £18m debt and Whyte gets £18m plus management fees for the shiny £1 coin he has stumped up.
ernie lynch says:
1 February, 2012 at 10:19
I know what you say is sound. As it usually is but, theres something that I can’t put my finger on ?
Hail! Hail!
Rogueleader
you make the fundamental mistake imho of believing Alistair Johnson and Paul Murray
Hail Hail
Rogue Leader
bang on.
Looking at it there is just no way they can buy players and meet running costs if that 24 million has already been spent, espeicially if there is a drop in season ticket sales at any point for the next 4 years and who is going to pay in droves if they canny sign anyone? The fiasco they’ve seen of players turning up on trial, getting their lunch and their bus fare home (mibbe) will become the norm whether they got Alex Ferguson in as manager so who in their right mind would take that.
That money must be paid back regardless of what happens with the tax case.
Could Whyte be sitting on the money knowing they were going to lose the case based on the advice offered?
MIH might be paying for the lawyers on this case but what of the fallout cases? Who pays for that?
As their own commentators have said the money isn’t on the park so where did it go if it wasn’t used to pay off Lloyds debt? The questions over VAT and the Euro licence are now in the public domain and thanks to Alastair Johnston an investigation into how he took over is now underway by HMRC. This is butchery under any other name.
The fight for what will be left of the sorry mess is well and truly on with the Record doing what is predictable – sticking with those they know to seek favour before the fallout.
But I would urge everyone to tell their greeting faced hordes – you did this to yourselves. You embraced Murray and all his smoke and mirrors and then you did the same with Craig Whyte. They should look in the mirror for someone to blame ultimately just as the moronic Hearts fans with the Cossack hats have to accept they bought into a false dawn just as eagerly.
There are precious few Fergus McCann’s in this world and even less these days willing to invest in a footballing backwater of a league when they clamber over each other for the EPL.
The next few years will be very interesting and the legal cases could run for at least 5 years over the corpse of Rangers should the increasingly likely liquidation event or at best administration event occur the very real decade in the Wilderness will ensue.
If they are liquidated and their history wiped, no amount of honest mistakes will ever catch our trophy haul and we should remind them of that every day with the Tortoise and the Hare story. Hubris is a fine thing when it happens to someone else.
‘The Octopus VCT will adopt a lower risk investment approach by investing in companies where Octopus believes there is a higher level of capital preservation. The main risk associated with traditional VCT investments is capital loss on investments (e.g. from a portfolio of private/AIM listed companies). The Octopus VCT has been designed to mitigate these risks using both insurance and deal structure. ‘
-surprised they got involved with ole Craig and his Motley Crew of mountebanks.
How could the poundaire borrow money with rangers tickets as guarentees when he didn’t own the buns yet?
Rogue Leader
I lost the ability to keep up yesterday – real life keeps intruding.
1. The £18m either from the loyal via Ticketus or GEF has taken a loan from the Bank of F*** You, Pay Me. GEF being self funded is just not credible, right?
2. I probably dreamt this, but was there something yesterday about Ticketus now holding the floating charge i.e. they are now the only secured creditor? That’s a game changer if so as GEF has now lost all control over the post solvency process – that would truly be the end for them – i.e. no quicky pre pack Newco – as Awe Naw says above – the other creditors could then bleed the corpse for long time.
Neil and the gang – ignore all this bobbins and train hard for Saturday.
HH
TLK
So if the bears go bust, the gorilla will have killed them and the octopus will be waiting to pick over the bones.
JohnnyMorris CSC
What’s likely to be the number of season tix purchased for the ole Badgerdome next season, and the season after that?
A rapidly diminishing number, especially if we push on and win the League this year.
Another wee pebble being placed on their pile of woes is the League table, they’re not 15 points ahead now, thanks to Neil Lennon and his hooped heroes.
Not sure if this has been answered but how can someone sell something he doesn’t own?
If as claimed, Craig Whyte mortgaged future season ticket sales to Ticketus prior to his acquisition of the club, how can that have been legal as the future incomes weren’t his (at that time) to sell.
Mort
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3_hyBbvFZI
Enjoy
Awe_Naw – going by the timescales printed in The Record (I know, I know) it is hard to draw any other conclusion. You have a former director, going on record, saying he has seen the lawyers account showing the money being paid for Rangers season tickets, a full month prior to the acquisition of the club. The Record must have been very very sure of this to print it considering the litigious Mr Whyte.
I am sure if this very pertinent part of the article was untrue Whytes PR goons would have been all over it like a rash…..ripping that nugget to shreds discredits the whole article. They didn’t. They didn’t touch the pertinent facts actually.
Mort – and therein is the question….this is getting very very messy
Mysteries of Data Pool 3 give Rupert Murdoch a whole new headache
The arrest of four Sun journalists threatens to open a fresh phase of the scandal surrounding News International
Nick Davies
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 January 2012 20.00 GMT
Rupert Murdoch’s Management and Standards Committee has given Scotland Yard access to an enormous reservoir of material from News International’s central computer servers.
On Saturday morning, the police arrested four journalists who have worked for Rupert Murdoch. For a while, it looked as though these were yet more arrests of people related to the News of the World but then it became clear that this was something much more significant.
This may be the moment when the scandal that closed the NoW finally started to pose a potential threat to at least one of Murdoch’s three other UK newspaper titles: the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
The four men arrested on Saturday are not linked to the NoW. They come from the Sun, from the top of the tree – the current head of news and his crime editor, the former managing editor and deputy editor.
Nothing is certain. No one has been convicted of anything. The four who were arrested on Saturday – like the 25 others before them – have not even been charged with any offence. But behind the scenes, something very significant has changed at News International.
Under enormous legal and political pressure, Murdoch has ordered that the police be given everything they need. Whereas Scotland Yard began their inquiry a year ago with nothing much more than the heap of scruffy paperwork seized from the NoW’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, Murdoch’s Management and Standards Committee has now handed them what may be the largest cache of evidence ever gathered by a police operation in this country, including the material that led to Saturday’s arrests.
They have access to a mass of internal paperwork – invoices, reporters’ expense claims, accounts, bank records, phone records. And technicians have retrieved an enormous reservoir of material from News International’s central computer servers, including one particularly vast collection that may yet prove to be the stick that breaks the media mogul’s back. It is known as Data Pool 3.
It contains several hundred million emails sent and received over the years by employees of the News of the World – and of the three other Murdoch titles. Data Pool 3 is so big that the police are not even attempting to read every message. Instead, there are two teams searching it for key words: a detective sergeant with five detective constables from Scotland Yard working secretly on criminal leads; and 32 civilians working for the Management and Standards Committee, providing information for the civil actions brought by public figures and for the Leveson inquiry and passing relevant material to police.
For News International, Data Pool 3 is a nightmare. Firstly, no one know what is in there. All they can do is wait and see how bad it gets.
Second, the police clearly believe it may yield new evidence of the crimes they set out to investigate – the “blagging” of confidential data from phone companies, banks, tax offices etc; the interception of voicemails and emails; the payment of bribes to police officers.
Third – and most nightmarish – Data Pool 3 could yield evidence of attempts to destroy evidence the high court and police were seeking. Data Pool 3 itself was apparently deliberately deleted from News International’s servers.
If proved, such conduct would be serious because it could see the courts imposing long prison sentences; and because it could have been sanctioned by senior employees and directors.
The Guardian last July revealed police suspicions that a huge number of emails had been deliberately destroyed. Since then, high court hearings have disclosed more detail. Late in 2009, News International decided to delete old email from their servers. This appears to have been a simple piece of electronic housekeeping. However, the plan was not executed.
During the summer of 2010, the actor Sienna Miller decided to sue the NoW for hacking into her voicemail. At the same time, according to evidence in the high court civil claim, internal emails were being sent urging that the deletion plan be executed. Still, it was not.
On 6 September 2010, Sienna Miller’s solicitor, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, wrote to News International asking them to “preserve all the documents in your possession relating to our client’s private life”.
On 9 September, an internal message pressed for the emails to be deleted “urgently”. As Mr Justice Vos explained in a judgment last month: “Only three days after the solicitors for Sienna Miller had written their letter before action, asking specifically that the company should retain any emails concerned with the claim, what happened was that a previously conceived plan to delete emails was put into effect at the behest of senior management.”
In December 2010, the NoW’s Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the email archive had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, News International’s solicitor, Julian Pike from Farrer and Co, provided the high court with a statement claiming they were unable to retrieve emails more than six months old.
On 7 January 2011, News International gained access to the evidence that had been assembled by Sienna Miller’s lawyers. On 12 January, the company issued detailed instructions for the secure retention of relevant data. Later that month, News International handed three old emails to Scotland Yard, triggering the new police inquiry. In the same month, a second significant deletion is believed to have happened. By this time, the entire contents of Data Pool 3 had been deleted.
However, under pressure from the lawyers involved in the high court civil actions, News International were compelled to allow technical experts to examine their servers.
On 23 March 2011, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged that News International could retrieve emails as far back as 2005 and that none had been lost en route to Mumbai. He said he had been misinformed.
In October, technicians started to restore the millions of deleted emails. By December, the entire contents of Data Pool 3 had been recovered. The implications are considerable.
On Saturday, as police searched parts of the Sun office, a press release from News Corp referred discreetly to an “internal investigation into our three remaining titles.” The Times is already under pressure from an allegation that a reporter hacked into a target’s email to obtain a story. In an unexplained line in his statement to the Leveson inquiry, the Sunday Times editor, John Witherow, said “a freelance journalist/researcher who has done occasional work for the paper was arrested on suspicion of breaching the Fraud Act. The police investigation is still continuing.”
Whether more of News International’s UK titles are dragged into the police inquiry remains to be seen. The threat is there: it may or may not materialise. Similarly, it is not yet clear whether police will find evidence that senior employees and directors did order the destruction of evidence. Equally important, the police may find evidence of more victims who may want to launch more legal actions.
At the outer reaches of possibility, police may find evidence of illegal activity by other private investigators, which could conceivably lead them to other news organisations who also hired them. Since Saturday morning, nothing is certain.
I just think that a club that does not publish full accounts shouldn’t be allowed to be in the SPL/SFA.
There is a supposed ‘fit and proper’ person test (Aye, right!). As far as I’m concerned if the accounts are secret – or just a sham- then its not a fit and proper club. That goes for Hearts, Rangers, Portsmouth, Leeds, Liverpool, Man U..whoever.
Mort – I asked the same question last night on here.
I now think, funds could have been loaned to a solicitor to hold securely until a contract with security was signed. At that point CW would get the cash. If no contract was signed by a certain date, the funds would return to the lender.
Although, AJ said later in the interview that Ticketus loaned Rangers the money so I don’t know which of his contradicting statement to believe… if any!
QB
KevJungle says:
1 February, 2012 at 10:23
There is definitely something fishy with Whyte´s takeover and ownership of the club.
My theory and it’s just an opinion is he is there to simply take Rangers through the liquidation process. Then once the Newco Rangers is formed some rich hun will pick up the club then. I don´t think its Murray however, he is finished.
RogueLeader says:
1 February, 2012 at 10:31 /
He did say he wasn’t going to buy the DR ever again though.
Pretty strong stuff.
Mort -is it not a variation on the scam that allowed the Glasers to buy Man U?
Although obviously in terms of profitability, global fan base and marketing potential Man U
are like Beyonce and the Horribles are like wee Michelle Mcmanus.