When asked if the £33m he claimed to have lodged for the purchase of Rangers, was “Your own money from your own personal wealth?” in today’s Scotland on Sunday (SoS), Craig Whyte told the newspaper, “Yes, that was done as far back as November 2010.” Perhaps not the most useful information to put into the public domain during divorce proceedings.
I think every single one of you who referred to Craig Whyte as a billionaire, or the cheeky “MBB” (Motherwell born billionaire) owes him an apology. While Hero Whyte didn’t deny he was a billionaire he told SoS he doesn’t “talk about [his]personal wealth to anybody” and that those of you who make continual references to his considerably wealth are “making [him]look silly”.
Let’s be clear, this man does not need you to make him look silly. Please desist and apologise.
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CW: About today’s game Alistair, highly disappointing, I thought that we could hve done better!
Ally: Sorry boss, but remember that we selt Jelly and wee Naisy’s out and they refs arenae sticking to the script!
CW: Excuses Alistair! I expect better! And another thing, why were we wearing Orange today?
Fatty on phone to Watty
Rangers raging that their disgruntled hordes didn’t throw coins at them!
Ben and Jerry’s/Haagen Das?
Haagen Das/Ben and Jerry’s?
Walls/Mackies?
Mackies/Walls?
Then there’s all those flavours to choose from before we even start on the damned Jelly!
I knew those Huns would pose a problem for us this season.
Oops:
Sorry, having a problem with the link.
WeeJoe says:
5 February, 2012 at 14:54
I thought it sounded too perfect as if it had been edited in…Could be wrong and my old paranoia kicking in
Rangers won 3-2. Whyte negotiated a deal where they use goals from the next 3 seasons Scottish cups this season!
Bluebells go booooo
Half Time Hearts 1 St Johnstone 0.
The game that the Celtic management team are concentrating on.
http://food.sndimg.com/img/recipes/18/14/79/large/picBFGfAv.jpg
Think ah used tae hiv this suit
Me joost noo
bournesouprecipe says:
5 February, 2012 at 15:03
Did you finish painting the bathroom?
Spoke to Chris in the the lawyers office,
said he’s never heard of you but,if he did
you’re an idiot .:O) hail hail
ulysses mcghee says:
5 February, 2012 at 14:57
Thye have couches in Dundee ?
Lease Back – based on their attendance today 17,822:
Interesting that the recurring questioning by the Laptop Loyal (of the MBB’s Ticketus deal) has failed to highlight the obvious massive ratio change (dependent on tax/ trading outcomes) – current projected forward sales versus the likelihood of a serious drop in future attendances (their imminent/ future league status).
Assuming MBB has sold-off circa 35% of ST income they then need to sell an additional circa 27K per game to maintain the status quo. At a rough guess – as soon as their ST sales fall below the 30K total (see today’s example attendance) then Ticketus in effect would be the majority shareholder of their ST income.
If (as has been suggested) Ticketus have a floating charge over the stadium – do they then exercise their right (when sales fall below 30K) to take the stadium in lieu and become the sole landlord?
Would such an arrangement make sense for Ticketus? It would guarantee them a venue that they receive continuous rent from + a long-term ST income (projection being that Newco will eventually achieve a return to a higher stage) but maybe there is another scenario?
If Ticketus become the owners of the stadium – Ticketus would be in a position to maximise their own income stream. They are in the market to sell tickets – they would own a venue that could stage; concerts, jamborees, whatever!
The Tennant sponsored incumbents could well become lifetime Tennents!
Testing (thumbsup)
Anybody know why I can no longer post comments under my normal login? (thumbsup)
I said to my wife this morning.
‘Well I’m going to do something I rarelt if ever do today.’
She foolishly thought I meant rid the garden of winter detritus or some such other cleanliness act, and smiled expectantly.
‘I’m going to watch Rangers for 90 minutes and they won’t be playing Celtic.’
I think the last time I watched them was way back when Dundee were in the SPL and beat them 4-2 or something like that.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want to see if they are any good after all the stuff in the press. We still need to beat them to win the league.’
– my thoughts.
Their best player, by a country mile, is the boy who had to pay his own transfer and he is intermittent and should be easily defended against.
I would happily play them tomorrow and every day after.
But.
They are allowed to foul with impunity and would ‘do’ our players in 90mins. Nasty work ethic which I firmly believe is instituted in the dressing room.
Oh, and in case you’ve been clasping your ears in disbelief – Walter Smith did what he did over the past 3 seasons with ‘no’ money to spend.
Can you imagine if they had a billionaire to fund them now????
WOOOOOFFFFTTTTTT!!!!!!!!
philvis
How do we know you are the real deal?
as an aside as rangers were spending money they did not have celtic and other clubs had to try to keep up which cost progress off the field with every penny going towards the first team.
i hope the change of events leads to a more successful celtic team with more money to improve other aspects of the club
bournesouprecipe – Ask me something only Philvis would know. (thumbsup)
Jaysus that was a struggle,
My Father in Law came down to watch the huns game, now generally I dont watch that mob but today he was in so hey ho,
anyway it took all my efforts to make sure the oul bugger stayed right till the end and then watched the after match analysis.
really quite pleased with that effort
Afternoon bhoys from a cold, but a warm hearted hun free mountain.
That was good was it not.
Best post during all the hilarity imo goes to Kittoch.
I see all the ragers fans have come dressed as seats…….pure magic…….
VP
That’s easy to understand.
So, tried again logging in and out of my normal account.
Cleared cache, tried different browser… can’t add comments.
Can anybody help? (thumbsup)
Rangers have more jokes than Tam Sheppard
derry celt says:
5 February, 2012 at 15:05
Rangers got beat 0-2. Whyte negotiated a deal where they use goals from the next 3 seasons Scottish cups this season!
—
Fixed ;-)
What a pleasant day it has been. :))
Looking forward, surely Dundee Utd (and any other SPL team) should realise that there is no need for a newco to be parachuted into the SPL. I’ve only seen up to the first goal but DU outclassed them when Rangers need was much greater. The sooner they are consigned to history the better for the whole of Scottish football.
philvis
I think you will have to delete the youtube link in your name.
Published on Sunday 5 February 2012 00:00
Craig Whyte ends a difficult week with a candid discussion with Tom English, on where the season ticket money has gone, the Jelavic deal and the future of Rangers
Q: It’s been a bruising week for you. Tickets and tax and rumours and innuendo. Your manager was on the verge of walking out. Or maybe not…
A: Yeah, you hear all these stories that he’s ready to pack it in and it’s total crap. These rumours got so strong during the week that even my sister called me and said she’d heard that Ally had resigned. I told her it was rubbish. Ally and I talk regularly and he’s very, very determined and very, very focused. I don’t know why people don’t want to believe that.
Q: OK, let’s kick-off with one of the questions of the week. It’s been revealed that you raised £24.4 million in much-needed funds by pre-selling tranches of Rangers season tickets for the next four seasons…
A: It was closer to £20m, but carry on.
Q: Right, £20m then. What have you done with the money? Where is it?
A: We’ve got running costs somewhere in the region of £3.5m a month. That’s what it costs to keep the lights on. People don’t understand the business side of football. They’re all very quick to go and criticise but nobody else was prepared to step up to the plate and I guess if you look over the last week you can understand why.
Q: People want to know where the ticket money has gone…
A: Well, OK, I won’t do it line by line but I’ll give you some examples. There’s a £10m funding hole that needs to be filled. I’ve said that before. I have nothing to apologise for. This is the reality of the club. There was several million that had to be repaid from an old ticket arrangement from the previous board. There were things like transfer payments. We still owed £1m to Rapid Vienna from when we bought Nikica Jelavic. We owed £1m on the James Beattie signing. Believe me, every single penny of the Ticketus money has stayed in the club. What I want to get across is that the fans’ money is safe, it’s underwritten by one of my companies and everything I do is in the best long-term interests of the club.
Q: Mortgaging season tickets is a high-risk strategy, though. Clubs do it, but on this scale? What if season tickets sales plummet? Do you fear a season ticket boycott?
A: No, why would there be?
Q: It would be understandable if Rangers fans were spooked. This is the allegation, that you used the Ticketus money to fund your takeover of the club…
A: No, from the messages I’ve had I don’t think people believe that. The occasional person, maybe. I know Ally said on Friday that this is the time to rally round the club. This is going to be a tough few weeks and we need everybody with us and on the whole that’s what people are doing. The allegation is wrong. Anybody with half a brain would figure that one out. The sale of the club went through prior to the arrangement for the tickets. It’s absurd. Do you think Lloyds and Sir David Murray would have given me the time of day if I hadn’t proved I had the money?
Q: You say you lodged £28m in a bank account as proof of funds during the negotiating process?
A: I think it was closer to £33m actually.
Q: Your own money from your own personal wealth?
A: Yes, that was done as far back as November 2010.
Q: Can you prove it?
A: I can, yes.
Q: Can you e-mail me the documents and kill some conspiracies?
A: I see what you’re getting at and there might be some benefit in doing that. Let me think about it. I’ll give it some consideration.
Q: I’ve asked you before about your personal wealth and you told me to get lost. Fair enough. But can you blame people for being suspicious when they see you selling off chunks of season tickets just to keep the club going? You’ve been described – hysterically – as a billionaire with wealth off the radar. Why are you selling your chief goal-scorer?
A: The billionaire thing has caused me no end of problems in all sorts of areas. It didn’t come from me. I can promise you that. It was reported last week that my PR people once tried to tell newspapers that I’m a billionaire but I just don’t believe that. I don’t talk about my personal wealth to anybody and so I didn’t tell a PR company to go and say that. It’s been used against me now. It’s making me look silly. People assume that I said it and I didn’t say it. I would never say it. I never claimed to be any such thing, but even if I was I wouldn’t necessarily handle the situation any differently. Rangers needs to be a long-term sustainable business and that’s the bottom line. The club needs to change.
Q: Do you rue the day you darkened Sir David Murray’s door?
A: There are days where you say “Why did I bother!” On the whole, though, I think it’s going to be tremendously satisfying to pull this through and achieve what I set out to do. I’ve made mistakes. We all do. When I look at it with hindsight there are things I would do differently. I should have spoken about the magnitude of the problem earlier, but on the other hand we were challenging to win the title and I didn’t want to be Mr Negative.
Q: The magnitude of the problem. Ally spoke on Friday about the club’s “serious, serious predicament” with HMRC and about how “the welfare of the club is the most important thing – greater than getting results”. That’s a fairly profound statement…
A: Yeah, I agree with him. This has the potential to be the toughest few weeks in the club’s history.
Q: You’re expecting a verdict from HMRC in the next few weeks?
A: Possibly.
Q: So you’re in full-on crisis mode?
A: I wouldn’t say crisis is the right word. Not at the moment. But we’re certainly in the toughest time in the club’s history. The next few weeks. I’d definitely say that much.
Q: Ally has said that he doesn’t know what your battle plan is in the event of the HMRC verdict going against the club. Why not tell him?
A: Well, you know I play my cards close to my chest. Ally and I work closely together and if that situation arises he’ll be the first to know about it. We’re talking about hypotheticals here.
Q: Are you nervous about it?
A: Not nervous at all. There’s a plan in place for any eventuality.
Q: I’ll try again. What’s the plan?
A: I couldn’t go into it. If I publicised it then it would potentially jeopardise what we’re working on. But, remember, I bought the club with this thing hanging over it. I’ve been thinking about it since day one. The long-term interests of the club is what I think about every day.
Q: There is also talk, on top of everything else, of £5m owed in VAT. Are you sitting on a Mount Everest of debt?
A: There’s a lot of media hostility towards myself and Rangers. It irks me sometimes. The VAT thing is rubbish. I have regular dialogue with HMRC about a number of issues, in particular the Employment Benefit Trust case. All sorts of things. I talk to them often, I know exactly what they’re doing and what they’re thinking and there’s no issue on that front.
Q: Right, can we clear up some transfer window stuff?
A: Fire away.
Q: Jelavic has gone for £5.5m. Are Rapid Vienna entitled to a slice of that action?
A: No.
Q: I think £5.5m is a lousy deal for Rangers. He’s really undervalued at that price. Fulham paid between £10m and £12m for Bryan Ruiz last summer and nobody is going to convince me that Ruiz is a better player than Jelavic. What actual bids did you get for him?
A: Two, one from Everton and the other from West Ham. The Everton bid was the best one for the club.
Q: But West Ham bid £7m…
A: Did they?
Q: Didn’t they?
A: Of course it wasn’t £7m. Look, the desire was to get a lot more money for the player but he’s only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for him on a given day. The West Ham bid was a complicated offer with all sorts of strings attached. There were certain things contingent on them getting promoted and we might have had to take one of their players and he was on a high salary. Believe me, I accepted the best bid. He wanted to leave and we needed the money, simple as that. I’ve spoken about the gap in our finances already this week. It’s £10m.
Q: We’ll get back to that, but more transfer stuff. Fran Sandaza, the St Johnstone player, claims that somebody from Rangers contacted him on Tuesday to say you might make another move for him…
A: I don’t know what happened there. If Ally wanted to sign Sandaza on the last day of the transfer window I’d have been happy to sanction that deal. For sure.
Q: You made a move for Gary Holt of Norwich instead. How much did you bid for him?
A: How much do you think?
Q: I heard three figures, £500,000, £600,000 and £1m. I’d go with £600,000.
A: No, it was £1m.
Q: But Norwich had already turned down over £2m for him…
A: I didn’t know that. What I do know was that the player was keen to come but Norwich didn’t want to lose him. That’s fair enough. Look, in years gone by you could have taken a punt in January and said ‘Right I’m going to spend £10m, we’re going to win the league and all that Champions League money will be ours’. But life is not like that anymore. We have to go through two qualifying rounds these days. You could spend £10m and not make it through to the Champions League and that would be painful. As custodian of the club I have to ask if that’s a risk worth taking and I have to say that it’s not. Look at what we did in the past. We spent huge money on duff players. My main ambition here is to get my sleeves rolled up and get on with the turnaround and make it a self-sustaining club.
Q: But if you’re not spending money on players how do you expect to give yourselves a chance of winning the SPL and qualifying for the Champions League, where all the big cash is?
A: The game has changed. The players we bring in should, mostly, be young guys that we can improve and maybe sell on for profit. Like I say, self-sustaining. That’s the way football clubs have to be. We can’t go on with a £10m deficit every season. Somebody had to call a halt to the way things were being done previously.
Q: Missing out on Europe was a shattering blow, right? Did you budget for Champions League money?
A: No, we budgeted for Europa League money which, based on the evidence going back many years, was a perfectly reasonable thing to budget for. That would have got us £5m, maybe a bit less. It never happened. The Champions League might get you £20m, but it goes back to the risk again. Is it worth it?
Q: So missing out on European football was the start of the cash-flow crisis. Is that fair?
A: Not absolutely fair. I think there are issues around that. I think because of all the negative coverage in the media and the tax case hanging over us, business partners who might have paid a year in advance before are now paying month to month and you have creditors who want to be paid quicker. The negativity is having repercussions.
Q: Neil Lennon said on Friday that the chickens are coming home to roost for Rangers now. Years of financial mismanagement have finally caught up on the club. Fair comment?
A: Somebody mentioned that to me. I’m not going to comment on what he said. I don’t think he should… No, you almost lured me into something there. I need to remind myself to be on my guard.
Message to Craig Whyte.
Theres a wedding at St Pius up the Drum next Thursday should be a cracking scramble there!
Off out for a beer courtesy of PaddyPower and the Arabs
philvis
What’s your favourite pub in Whifflet?
Is slagging gingers, just adding insult to gingery?
Are you team GB in the podium olympics?
Did the person who wrote the film 2012 have any logic. Does he work in the HMRC?
What do the following teams have in common:
Arbroath?
philvis
Drop a line to Paul67 at celticquicknews@gmail.com and he’ll fix it, he fixed it for me when someone was impersonating me with
comments that were funny.
Ghuys we really need to be careful not to write Ragers off too soon.
I mean that was their second game in the Scottish cup before they fell on their fat arses.
They went out all their previous cup campaigns ( champs lg, europa lg, Lg cup ) at the first round.
If you ask me they appear to be getting better as the season goes on.
HA……HAHA……HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Hail hail
MME
ps away to read back on the blog :-)))))))))
ernie lynch says:
5 February, 2012 at 14:50
Indeed, a poor quality Newco playing in front of 15,000 home supporers is not an attraction to Sky or any other broadcaster.
In any case, a team full of Bartleys, Kerkars, Littles and Celiks would struggle to survive in the SPL, so what would the MSM propose in such a scenario- scrap relegation to protect their SPL status??
petec – I tried removing the link in my username, it was to an image not Youtube, but removing it makes no difference. Still can’t post anything under philvisreturns.
Anybody around? Paul67? Hellooooo? (thumbsup)
bournesouprecipe – What’s your favourite pub in Whifflet?
That would have to be The Manhole or possibly The Cockpit. Or the one where all the women are over 6ft tall and have deep voices. Not one of those poncey places like the Big Tree.
Is slagging gingers, just adding insult to gingery?
That is not logically possible.
Are you team GB in the podium olympics?
No, because when Philvis swoops for a podium, he always gets gold.
P.I.N.G.
P.O.N.G.
(thumbsup)
It has been a great weekend. But I will be more comfortable after a win on wednesday. I want the treble, but I need the league won.
The media is doing their best now to make it look like they have nothing to play for and all the pressure is on us. Eyes on the prize bhoys. Eyes on the prize.