Tag: Rangers

It is tempting to leave this page blank, both in homage to Len Shackleton’s famous chapter on “The average directors’ knowledge of football” and because so much of what Rangers boss Ally McCoist has said this past week has left people speechless. But the sheer magnitude of McCoist’s folly deserves the fullest possible exposure. Talk of the new Rangers aping the old by going into administration has lit up Scotland’s traditional and social media since word got out last Thursday that Rangers’ first-team squad had been asked to consider taking a 15% pay cut and had declined so to do. Chief Executive Gordon Wallace’s claim that “no offer had been made” met with merited contempt and parody when he added that it was “more of a conceptual discussion about the possibility of some sort of reduction.” One contributor to the Celtic website Kerrydale Street’s ‘Next Sevco Discussion Thread’ suggested that Wallace might have “made them a conceptual discussion they can’t refuse.” And it was easy to imagine the players suggesting that Wallace consider discussing the concept of “getting tae ****.” But Wallace’s descent into the linguistic world of Brian Glanville-isms (one for the teenagers) was a momentary aberration. He has, after all, spoken the only sense so far on the subject of the restarted Rangers’ finances, telling last month’s AGM that “the current operating structure we have is too...

As 2013 was such a rubbish year for football governance and finance, who better to be football’s “man” of it than someone called Charlotte, who told a tale of financial skullduggery and subterfuge and whose real identity, or possibly identities, remain concealed? Mark Murphy thinks “no-one.” The phrase “internet phenomenon” is, granted, clichéd journalese. And I would hesitate to use it about a Twitter account whose origin and veracity remained shrouded in mystery (especially outside Scotland), for its seven months in and out of cyberspace. However, “Charlotte Fakeovers” was such a phenomenon… definitely the best of 2013 at summarising modern football businesses’ ills. Ad worthy of examination, now that “she” claims “my work is done and I’ve cashed in,” regardless of whether the Rangers-related material (s)he published was genuine (probably), genuinely obtained (probably not) or the work of an exceptionally febrile imagination. Project “Charlotte” was the codename for a bid fronted by English businessman Andrew Ellis to buy Rangers from David Murray in 2010 – Murray’s business HQ being in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square. The negotiations broke down and Ellis’s lasting Rangers legacy was to introduce Craig Whyte to the club. Ellis has since apologised… profusely. In May, CF started posting comments on the Scottish Football Monitor (TSFM), website set up “to cast a questioning and watchful eye on Scottish Football officialdom and the compliant mainstream media.” But although they...

The wretched soap opera which has been based in Govan in West Glasgow for so many years now has come to a potentially seminal episode. Rangers International Football Club PLC held its first Annual General Meeting (AGM) after the company, which runs the new Rangers FC, posted losses of approximately an arm and a leg during its first year of trading; gargantuan losses for a Scottish fourth-tier football club with regular home gates of 45,000+ and all the more inexcusable given the financial circumstances which required the club’s formation. The last AGM of “Rangers” shareholders, in 2009, was a chapter in a standard tale of financial mismanagement. The then-manager Walter Smith had said that Lloyds Banking Group were effectively running debt-laden Rangers. And this was manifested in the presence of one Donald Muir on the Rangers PLC board. Disaffected shareholders overwhelmingly voted Muir off on a show of hands. But this wasn’t the “right result” for the Ibrox powers-that-be. So the result was declared “uncertain” from the top table and put to a “card vote” in the style of supposedly archaic trade union block votes; whereupon majority shareholder David Murray’s block vote of 90 million-ish made the result less “uncertain.” It was much the same outcome in 2013, in that the will of the people (which Rangers fans claim “we are”) were thwarted by the card votes of RIFC’s...

The still potential return of Dave King to the Ibrox boardroom has provided a boost to the number of Northern Hemisphere hits received by various previously obscure South African business & finance websites. And if ‘Google’ employs people to monitor such things, those people will be scratching their heads at the concentration of search entries for “glib and shameless liar” coming from certain parts of the West of Scotland. Glasgow-born but since 1976 South Africa-based “entrepreneur” King was branded thus by a High Court Judge, Brian Smallwood, in October 2010. The comment came in a ruling on an appeal (lost) by King against part of the tax debt he recently settled by paying the South African Revenue Service (SARS) the equivalent of £44m and pleading guilty to 41 counts of what he recently called “statutory contraventions” of the country’s tax legislation. That’s “statutory” as in “law.” And “contraventions” as in “breaks,” each of which could have landed King in prison for two years. This ruling isn’t any more “news” than the disturbing revelations which emerged from Rangers’ annual accounts two weeks ago. It is available in all its 37,480-word glory on a “politicsweb” article headlined Dave King, a “mendacious witness” – another of Judge Smallwood’s King-directed gems. Indeed, veteran blogger Phil Mac Giolla Bhain quoted from the ruling in February 2011 in a piece which appears in his 2012 book Downfall,...