Rangers administration: The directors - who’s staying and who’s going

Published on Friday 24 February 2012 00:56

GORDON Smith and Ali Russell have left the club but who is staying on at Rangers?

Undecided? Craig Whyte

Craig Whyte, the owner of Rangers Football Club, became Scotland’s youngest self-made millionaire at the age of 26.

Starting off with a plant hire company he branched out into manufacturing before becoming a venture capitalist. He is now believed to be worth more than £1 billion.

Last May Sir David Murray sold his controlling interest in Rangers to Wavetower Ltd for £1. Wavetower Ltd, renamed The Rangers FC Group Limited, is owned by Whyte’s holding company Wavetower.

Whyte, a lifelong Rangers fan, said he was proud to be the new owner and pledged to invest £25 million into transfers over five years.

Staying: Dave King

A South African-based businessman, Dave King has an estimated personal fortune estimated at between £200-£300 million.

King was one of seven children, born and brought up in Castlemilk, Glasgow.

His business career began after being transferred to South Africa by his employers, the Weir Group. He initially worked as an adviser for the Post Office and the Reserve Bank before making a career leap with a company which won a contract to manage Umgeni Water.

In March 2000 King joined Rangers’ board and soon afterwards invested £20m of his own money in the club. Earlier this month he received an e-mail saying he was being removed from the board but is still listed as a director.

Staying: Andrew Ellis

Ellis, a London-based property developer, joined Rangers’ board following the takeover by Craig Whyte.

Ellis has been linked with previous club deals – a £9m takeover of Queens Park Rangers in 2011 and a year later he led a consortium paying £500,000 for Northampton Town where he took over as chairman. He stepped down after two months, saying football chairmanship was “too time-consuming”.

Gone: Ali Russell

Ali Russell, who left as Rangers’ chief operating officer yesterday, arrived at Ibrox with a diverse background in sport north and south of the Border.

Before arriving at Rangers his former bosses at Queens Park Rangers, where he was managing director from January 2007 to January 2011, had been the F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore.

Russell was “head hunted” to work alongside QPR’s chairman Gianni Paladini, a former agent entrusted with the task of fronting Ecclestone and Briatore’s joint £20 million investment in the club. But during his time at QPR he divided fans’ opinions with the introduction of a new ticket pricing structure.

Russell served as commercial director at Hearts between August 2004 and January 2007. He had also held an executive position with the Scottish Rugby Union.

When Russell moved to QPR in 2008, Phil Anderton, then chief executive of Scottish Rugby, said: “He has a sound, down-to-earth commercial reality about him. He knows what’s going to work and what isn’t, but he’s also willing to try things and I liked that about him. He had a lot of initiative.”

Russell arrived at Rangers with an ambitious blueprint to increase the club’s revenues and fulfil Craig Whyte’s promise of “expanding the brand” and seek new commercial revenue steams.

Gone: Gordon Smith

Gordon Smith was, until yesterday, director of football at Rangers.

The 57-year-old was a key player for Rangers for three seasons in the late 1970s before he left to join Brighton.

After retiring from the game he went on to become a football agent and a BBC football pundit. He was also assistant manager at St Mirren between 1990 and 1993.

In 2007 he was appointed chief executive of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) until his resignation for personal reasons in April 2010 when he left to join Rangers. On his appointment, Smith said: “This operational board will discuss everything but Ally will decide who we get, although there is always a ceiling on any player.”

Smith’s remit predicted he would be heavily involved in contract negotiations, both with players Rangers want to retain and those they wanted to attract to the club.

His time at the SFA was a turbulent period, with the appointment of two managers – George Burley and Craig Levein – and the infamous 2009 disciplinary incident involving Allan McGregor and Barry Ferguson.

Smith has made a number of outspoken remarks during his career. He attracted controversy after claiming in a chapter in a book It’s Rangers For Me that there was “an agenda against Rangers” and that the club was given a tougher time than Celtic over sectarian chanting by fans.

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