Rangers administration: Plenty of fizz left in drama

ON A day when Craig Whyte’s grip on Rangers appeared to loosen ever further and when the club’s administrators had some veiled criticism for the apparent front-runners in the takeover process, the Blue Knights, there was further speculation around the validity of the most audacious deal in the Old Firm since Mo Johnston joined Rangers.

As reported in The Scotsman on Thursday, Whyte’s arrangement to sell up to 100,000 future season tickets at Ibrox to Ticketus for £20 million plus VAT is believed to be the subject of intense scrutiny by Duff & Phelps, the Rangers administrators. Yesterday, Paul Clark didn’t wish to be drawn on the Ticketus deal but he said that there would be an announcement relating to it in the next week or ten days.

“There are on-going discussions with us and Ticketus – and now those meetings might include parties from the Blue Knights – in relation to their right, if any, to season tickets,” said Clark. “We’re looking to clarify the position of their rights in the next week or so.”

Quite how the Ticketus deal can be unravelled is unclear, but there would be appear to significant confidence that it can be declared null and void. If that’s case, it would serve as a massive fillip for Rangers fans and could, in theory, send a shockwave through the Blue Knights consortium, which announced on Friday that Ticketus were now part of its group. Ticketus, of course, believes that its rights to the season tickets are copper-bottomed but its claim is now in serious jeopardy.

If the Ticketus deal can be undone, then it’s the demolition of a significant barrier to any sale. Clark is playing down the significance of two other barriers – the HMRC big tax case settlement and Whyte’s claim on Ibrox and Murray Park. Both of these, said Clark, are not obstacles to the future sale of the club. If he is right, then Rangers might well avoid the doomsday scenario of liquidation. There was news, too, on the potential bidders for the club and a bit of a slap for the Knights.

“What we want,” said Clark, “is to have only serious bidders left by the end of the week. So anybody who has just been talking – and there are a few out there who have done a lot of talking – we want to seek them out and, as it were, [get them to] put their money where their mouth is.

“Let’s get them round a table so we know how many parties we’ve got. I don’t care how many bidders we end up with but I want to know who they are, what they are and what their worth is, so then we can have more serious conversations about achieving the end goal which is to get Rangers under new ownership. This is the problem we have got, we have one or two parties prepared to talk to the media and then you have other parties who have been quietly and slowly and diligently getting on with their business behind closed doors outside of the glare of the media and we are taking them just as seriously as anybody who is on the front page of the newspapers saying, ‘I’m going to buy Rangers, you just watch’. If somebody wants to involve the media, that’s fine. And if they become the owner then they can sit on the front page of all the papers saying, ‘I did it’. But don’t be surprised if that owner isn’t one of the people who is media friendly.”

This, clearly, was a reference to Paul Murray’s Blue Knights, the group which has made no secret of its interest in buying the club.

“By the way, I am not ruling anybody out in this process, absolutely not,” said Clark. “I’m just saying that nobody should assume that the only serious bidders are the ones who are in the public domain.”

The Knights won’t like the sound of that one little bit. It’s also of significance that one of its number, Dave King, would be disqualified from taking a boardroom position. King breached the SFA’s fit and proper person criteria by being a member of the board that took the club into an insolvency event (under Whyte). King had little to do with it, but he’s damned by it all the same.

It wasn’t the kind of news that Paul Murray, pictured above left, would have liked to hear, nor is this feeling that the Ticketus arrangement with Rangers could be about to collapse. How that would impact on his consortium is hard to fathom at this point.

“I don’t want to be specific about bidders but there is at least one party from the Far East and we’ve had some interest as well from the American continent,” said Clark on the rivals to the Knights. “We’re talking about Scotland, wider UK and some overseas parties. There’s been a number of meetings over the last few days and more planned for next week. I’ve got two calls to two different parties over the weekend. We have an online data room for those parties so they can go in and take information over and above what we’ve told them in our meetings.

“You’ve got different people asking different questions. We hope and believe that a new owner will be installed before the end of the season so that it’s not us in charge at season’s end. That’s our objective. What we’ve done so that people realise they need to speed themselves up is to say that on Friday we want to receive absolute proof of your funding so we understand who you are and which camp you are in because some people have feet in various camps.

“We want to know who exactly has your money. More importantly, we want some form of indicative bid, so that will distil down however many parties we have got at the moment to the final few.”

Another week of drama is guaranteed.