Rangers administration: Fourth bid for Rangers but mystery over who

A FOURTH conditional bid has been received for Rangers, it was confirmed yesterday.

The club’s administrators Duff and Phelps gave no details of the latest interest to be lodged in buying the Ibrox side, though there have been reports that a syndicate from the Middle East could be behind an offer that comes four days after the administrator’s deadline for indicative first bids.

The three received by last Friday were headed up by the proposal from director Paul Murray’s Blue Knights consortium, which includes Ticketus, whom Duff and Phelps have gone to the Edinburgh Court of Session to request have their controversial £20million deal for future Rangers season tickets nullified.

A ruling is expected on the administrators’ petition, which they claimed on Monday would, if upheld, lead one bidder to pull out. Yet the Blue Knights are looking to their tie-up with Ticketus to provide them with the £5m working capital they would initially require in the event of taking over from Craig Whyte, whose ownership and secured creditor status has not, to date, been challenged by Duff and Phelps, despite administrator Paul Clark declaring Whyte, who owns 85.3 per cent of the club’s shares, “irrelevant”.

Precisely how Whyte will be edged out remains unclear. As does whether HMRC will accept a Company Voluntary Agreement (CVA). The administrators appear confident a CVA can be obtained to prevent Rangers going into liquidation.

However, suggestions they could be willing to take as little as 10p in the £1 for a sum of up to £60m in unpaid taxes - if Rangers lose the ‘big tax case’ - do not square with how HMRC have approached such cases.

Other bids have come from Scots businessman and Sale Sharks owner Brian Kennedy, who has admitted his interest has been undertaken reluctantly and only as a fall-back to ensure Rangers do not disappear, and Club 9 Sports, who come under the auspice of a Chicago investment firm. They have failed in two previous attempts to buy into British football, bidding for Tranmere and Sheffield Wednesday in recent years.

Meanwhile, on Channel 4 News last night, former director Hugh Adam reiterated his claims that Rangers made payments to players through EBTs that they did not lodge with the SPL and SFA. Last week former owner David Murray admitted that EBT payments were not included in contracts because they were “discretionary” and took the form of “letters of intent”.

The rules, however, state clearly that all payments, regardless of which form they take, must be lodged with the governing bodies, as SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster made plain when announcing an investigation into Rangers’ possible non-disclosure of payment to players from 1998 until 2012. If the club are found to have improperly registered players from that entire period it could carry the sanction of voiding all their results.

That issue took a twist yesterday with it emerging that the SFA, who will be the appeals body for Rangers should they be found guilty, wrote to all 93 member clubs 12 days ago asking them if they had complied with Article 12 of the governing body’s articles of association over the past 10 years, which covers all payments made to players.

SFA chief executive Stewart Regan has given clubs until Friday, 6 April to send “any written agreement(s) falling within the scope of Article 12.3 which has/have not previously been lodged with the Scottish FA in the previous ten years, in respect of any current or former players of your club.” The information has been sought because “it has come to the attention of the Scottish FA that there could be a number of examples of non-compliance with the obligations of Article 12.3.”

Breaches could bring referral to the SFA’s Compliance Officer and subsequent disciplinary sanctions, as could result from failure to respond. The letter begins: “In light of recent well-publicised events, I would like to take this opportunity to remind clubs of their obligations pursuant to Article 12 of the Scottish FA’s Articles of Association.”

The information sought is “a declaration signed by the club secretary to the effect that your club has complied, without qualification, with the terms of this article at all times throughout the previous ten years” or any “written agreement(s)” within the last ten years, with regards to Article 12.3, which are not already in the Scottish FA’s possession.

These requests place the SFA, and their club president Campbell Ogilvie, in a curious position. For as secretary at Rangers in 2001, it is Ogilvie’s name that appears signing off the accounts – yet at the weekend he said, although he himself had an EBT, he wasn’t sure how these were administered with Ibrox playing staff.

Meanwhile, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore does not believe Celtic and Rangers will ever be allowed to join the top-flight south of the border. Scudamore said: “Our rules are simple. It says we’re a league formed for clubs that play in England and Wales. I don’t see that ever changing. I don’t see that changing on my watch, not that my watch may last for long. There’s more in it for them than there is for us.”