Rangers cost £1 ... Vlad wants £50m for Hearts

For a successful businessman, Vladimir Romanov appears to have a rather eccentric notion of the principle of trade. In assessing the value of Heart of Midlothian Football Club at £50 million, the little Lithuanian banker seems to betray an unseemly ignorance of the First Law of Buying and Selling.

This immutable statute, as old as mankind itself, decrees that, whatever figure may have been proposed by even the most fastidious and impartial of surveyors (far less the vendor himself), any commodity is worth only what the highest bidder is prepared to pay.

Perhaps a little intoxicated by his own sharply-honed optimism, Vlad momentarily forgot that Rangers changed hands for £1.