Tannochsidebear

This is absolute bollocks from the SFA, as usual. These guys are investors, not Directors. It is already on record that nobody will own more than 15%, so they are all minority investors. If the SFA want to know who the board will be made up of, I have no problem with that. But if they are pushing for names of investors, I would turn it right back at them and ask why they are doing no investigation into the conduct of a certain Mr Desmond of Scum FC, whose business antics and shady dealings are worthy of far more scrutiny as far as a fit and proper investor is concerned. As Mr Desmond is a majority shareholder (I'm sure he has more than 50%??) then surely if we are going to be looking at shareholder fitness, we can start with those already involved in the game instead of concentrating on those who "might" become involved.

Just a reminder to all Bears that this event will take place this Sunday at Ibrox. While the money might not be as crucial as we all thought it might be when both the RFFF and indeed this event were announced given that Green is financing the club for the next few weeks at least, it is still a fantastic project to get involved in. For a minimum £100, you can take part in the psonsored walk of 1 mile, 872 yards around the stadium, finishing at the tunnel where the names of all participants will be enscribed forever as a permanent reminder of those who helped the club through this dark and difficult time. There are still places available for anyone wanting to do this but time is running out. Check the official site for more details and to download a sponsor form. Incidentally, should the money in the RFFF not be required to keep the club afloat, it will be up to the fans who contributed to decide what to do with it. Some early ideas include a museum, funding youth development, sponsoring seats for schoolkids to come to matches etc. I believe there will be a vote/meeting when the dust settles to decide what is to be done.

It is probably worth remembering that Green is only the short-term acting CEO in this consortium from what we gather. A full and proper board is to be introduced post 6 July (everything going smoothly!). I am a naturally optimistic kinda guy so am prepared to take people at their word until I find they break it. That went for D Murray, CW, TBK and now Green. Unfortunately all 3 others mentioned are not good history lessons for this avenue of trust but it doesnt make it wrong to give the benefit of doubt whilst watching and checking very closely. i'm guessing that your contacts in Singapore from the Ng deal have an idea who the investors are from that location and that is making you a little sceptical? The Green consortium are not going to give out any more info until the CVA letter is sent, and wont present their full plan to fans until after it is accepted, by which time they will own the club anyway. My guess (hope) on that is that there are/is big names/money involved which would see a reluctance from creditors to approve a CVA if they knew the wealth of those involved.

I had heard they both said it was very likely to be agreed. Now that really is covering all bases! The BTC is 100% guaranteed to be included in the CVA no matter when it is published. HMRC cannot wait until this CVA process is over then hit us with it. If they delay too long they will end up getting nothing for it as their claim will be too late. They are simply a creditor in all this. It is up to creditors to put their claim in for monies owed by the business entity that existed at 14 Feb 2012. If the BTC does go against us, all that will happen in reality is that HMRC will have more than 25% of the debt and would be able to reject a CVA on its own. From what we have heard for months now, HMRC are not as worried about the payment of tax from the result as the result itself which allows them to go after the big boys for the big money, and would be comfortable with any realistic deal offered.

As far as the CVA goes, it will take just over 25% of the creditors named in the £55M list the Admin released weeks ago to reject the CVA in order for it to fail. As an individual entity, only Ticketus have this power as they are owed around half the total debt. HMRC has just under 25% (about 23.5%) and so could not block this alone, but would have to rely on others (perhaps football clubs,) to get to over 25%. As Green and the Admin are both on record as saying they have discussed matters with both ticketus and HMRC and are going forward positively with the CVA, you can only take from that that both parties are going to accept the CVA offer. I really dont see any problems for the CVA being agreed. I have never doubted that HMRC would be easy to deal with, it was only the treacherous Ticketus organisation that I seen as a potential problem. I would reming Green and the Admin that TBk had a "deal" done twice with Ticketus only to be shafted at the last minute by them, so until the CVA is agreed, and the 28 day cooling off period has passed, I would be watching them very carefully.

And lets remember DM had no option but to sell to CW as LBG told him to. LBG didnt care where the money came from or who it came from, they just wanted their money back.

Very unlike you Frankie, and therefore I'm a little intrigued at your concerns on this deal. Care to elaborate?

A good attempt by the Herald to create a scare story out of nothing. At £13M out of the £55M we owe, HMRC dont even have the 25% of our total debt to block the CVA. Only if HMRC FTT comes out with a payment due by us to add to their total will they even be in a position to block the CVA. As an accountant myself (although dealing with small businesses, not anything like this level) it is fair to say HMRC are being far more strict with businesses and with payment deadlines, but just yesterday I done a deal for a client with HMRC that will see my client pay a percentage of the debt due, so it still happens. For Beech to say HMRC will pursue a high profile business "with maximum prejudice" is going totally against what is happening out there in real life where the bigger and more high profile company you are, the more lenient HMRC are being so as not to damage the economy. Perhaps he should stick to lecturing about how things used to be as he clearly is agnorant of how things are currently. Expert or not.

Like you said earlier it looked like they were ruled out around 5pm and Green's group had it in the bag. A lot can happen while waiting for the banks to transfer funds though, but TBK must know this is their very last chance, if indeed they do still have a chance.

You and I have Rangers at heart John but we can't afford to buy the club right now. We can have a whip round with all our mates but if we still can't come up with the dough why do we deserve to be able to buy the club. And I'm all for a share issue and wish TBK had already done it, then we could be planning for next season.

That is essentially a sale and leaseback scenario Zappa, and is the sort of deal most fans would be absolutely furious with.

Why won't we accept anyone else John? I do totally agree that David Murray is the one ultimately responsible for this mess, and hope he is brought to book in due course.

There are not a lot of details out there about them as they have supposedly been working away on their bid in the background and kept it all very private. There are only 3 names I have heard and of them only Green is confirmed. The others are Freddie Shepherd and Joe Lewis (remember him from ENIC fame). Neither of these 2 have been confirmed. There is also talk of the finance coming from Singapore (not Ng), again unconfirmed. I would think more details will come out over next 48 hours and most bears will wait until they hear what they say before making their minds up. Of course others have already made up their minds that the bid is no good, just like all the other bids that were not TBK.

Thats all any of us can do in this saga, Casey.

I have covered that again in this OP Danny as to why, when D&P had agreed to announce TBK on the Monday as I declared, it went wrong at the last minute due to Ticketus admitting they had lied to TBK all along. Absolutely nobody had any incling that Ticketus were about to do this, or that TBK had not seen any written proof that Ticketus had the deal done with Whyte. The difference with my post today is that it deals with the past, not prediction of the future. I even qualified my info that Green will be PB by EOP Monday, we all learn from being bitten before!

Oh I see where you are coming from now Casey. I have contacts that are very close to people within the bidders and the club. I know I am not the only one with this info, so it can certainly be verified. Unfortunately the nature of the internet and forums mean that everything is (rightly) treated with suspicion. I can only put the info out there as I understand it. The only thing I can promise is that it is written without embellishment or with an agenda.

My role is that of impartial Rangers fan who only wants the best for the club and doesnt really care for personalities. I post on all the major forums, I am a supportive member of all the fans organisations (RST, Association and Assembly) so I dont have favourites as such. I am supportive of TBK "plans", but there is little to like about the way they have gone about it throughout the bidding process when they have known all along a bid of around £10M cash would always have been good enough. A lot of this info has been known for a while but not released so as to give TBK every chance to get the funding together to succeed, so I am certainly not anti-TBK in principle.

This is quite long but stay with it as it is important to anyone with our club's interests at heart. It was generally agreed that Paul Murray and Brian Kennedy gave an oscar winning performance to the media yesterday afternoon and on later interviews on tv, and if only their bid was as good as their words we would have been out of this mess many weeks ago. From information gathered from various sources close to TBK, the administrators and club officials, together with the email from Kennedy's laywer released yesterday afternoon, it is about time all Rangers supporters were shown the truth behind the myth about TBK bid for the club. Lets start at the beginning of this, which is when D Murray was about to sell to CW after months of protracted negotiations. P Murray came out and told everyone that CW was a bad sort (no arguments there!) and that he had offered D Murray £28M to buy the club but D Murray refused to sell it to him as he wanted to sell it to CW. At the time it sounded like sour grapes from an outgoing board member but remember the figure they quoted of £28M. Fast forward to February of this year and our entry into administration after weeks of speculation. On 1 March P Murray arranged a meeting with some high profile Rangers fans and some fans reps to explain his plan to buy the club with a view to getting some fans support. Paperwork was shown with bits of their business plan and it all sounded very impressive. Items including a massive board of Directors including many fans reps who would represent the new tiers of shareholders which would be created with a massive share issue sometime during the 12-13 season. There were to be three levels of shareholders, the lowest starting at £1000 a share but with pay-up options to ensure fans could contribute from as little as £10pw. Democratic elections of these fans reps would ensure accountability. No issues would be excluded from the fans. All very good news. When it came to discussions of funding, it was claimed at that time that there were around 10 Blue Knights in situ, and discussions were ongoing to take that number up to 20 before the bid was due to go in. To qualify as a Blue Knight an investor would have to part with £1M minimum. Obviously this would give TBK a pot of cash to buy and finance the club of around £20M, plus the income generated from a fans share issue which was estimated could be another £20M. This would pay off the club debts, give it a firm footing, and would ensure the club would come out of admin in a much stronger position. The next major incident came when TBK announced that they had negotiated a deal with Ticketus to take them out of the CVA pot. The deal was that Ticketus would accept a payment of £10M (much higher than they could have expected through a CVA) and in return would offer TBK an overdraft facility at competitive commercial rates of up to a further £10M. This rang alarm bells for some of us who wondered why this was happening when D&P had correctly won a court case to ensure Ticketus were not preferential creditors and were to go into the CVA pot along with other creditors, and would be repaid a fraction of the money they had given to CW to finance the purchase of the club. Up until this point Ticketus were seen as the bad guys who had done a deal with CW for OUR future season tickets in exchange for money to pay off LBG. Now this deal was hailed in some quarters as a fantastic piece of business that secured CW's shares (it was believed Ticketus would get CW's shares in exchange for not pursuing him for his personal guarantee for the £20-odd Million loan) and it was seen as the final piece of the jigsaw that would see TBK win the race to buy the club. On two consecutive weekends it was believed that TBK had won the race and would be declared Preferred Bidder (PB) on the Monday morning only to be scuppered on both occassions by the very same Ticketus that it was claimed were now not the bad guys, but very happy partners. The first time Ticketus tried to shaft TBK by running to Bill Ng looking for a better deal with him than they were getting from TBK. After Ng chased them away they came back to a now raging P Murray who reluctantly swallowed his pride for the good of his bid and agreed the same deal as before. Again D&P were happy to name them PB on the Monday, and this story broke widely over the weekend and things were looking good for TBK. Unfortunately for TBK, Ticketus again pulled the plug on the deal, admitting that they had no agreement with CW for his shares and therefore they were not able to proceed. While none of these two events were directly TBK fault, it shows that their choice of partners was at best suspect, and confirmed to those of us who questioned Ticketus's motives all along that if they were willing to break rules to get CW the club, they could not be trusted to act in the best interests of our club for anything. What the deal with Ticketus proved more than anything however, was that TBK original claims of having a number of investors and a large pot of cash was now fanciful at best. It was clear that they had not been able to convicne invetors to join their group, and instead of going with Ticketus, a deal that was claimed was the only way forward for the club, they should have either asked the fans to join them and bring forward the investment vehicle, or admit defeat and try to join forces with another interested party. Instead they continued with their black propaganda campaign, heavily involving their supporters from RST/FF and certain media outlets, into blackening the name of any other interested bidders, pressuring D&P to name TBK as PB when they could not realistically do that due to the level of bids involved, and continuing with the emotional balckmail of Rangers fans into believeing that they were the only true bid to take the club forward. This was never more carefully orchestrated than when Bill Miller was named as PB by D&P. Bill Miller spent hours talking to McCoist and Jardine but didnt want to go public to the fans until the deal was done so as to not get the fans hopes up too much. The feedback from these conversations were good, he answered all the questions asked of him, and it looked like the best way of explaining his interest would be to compare it to what McCann done for celtic. He wasnt a fan but a businessman from North America who spotted the chance to buy a massive institution for a low price, turn it around and make it work properly, and sell it on for a much higher price some years later. He also refused to comment on the negative campaign being waged against him, as he believed it gained nothing but a split in the support. How right he was. The reasoning of his decision to withdraw may or may not have had anything to do with the over 1,000 negative emails he received, but he certainly took into consideration that if there were 1,000 fans taking the time to contact him negatively BEFORE he took over, it would make his job much harder to convince them to buy season tickets and back his custodianship, and it can be argued that it may have been the tipping point that made him withdraw. We will probably never know for sure. The one thing that we can be sure of is that Bill Miller had a much better chance of success than TBK of getting a workable CVA. That is why they were named PB. In cash terms TBK offer was only £1.5M, with other later add-ons bringing it up, but only £1.5M of cold hard cash to buy the famous Rangers Football Club. Quite a far cry fromt he £28M P Murray was supposed to have offered a year previous. This brings us up to the present time. With the collapse of the Miller bid, there was talk of new interest including from a UK consortium, later publicised as being fronted by Mr Green. Lets cut to the chase now on what is happening with the two bids just now. The Green bid is £8M cash. Write a cheque, put it into the CVA pot, and move forward. Nice and simple. TBK latest bid is £9.1M as per the email from BK's lawyer to D&P which was publicly released yesterday in conjuction with the heart-warming press conference. Lets examine the £9.1M bid. It includes extra payments into the pot from Eurpoean success in the next few seasons, including a mention of some extra money if RFC makes the CL QF. While I would love us to be cometing at this level, even the most optimistic Bear would admit the CL QF stage is not something I would want my future income depending on, so it has to be ruled out by D&P. TBK have also added in other conditions which mean that extra payments will be made to creditors during the course of next season. Of course, this means that it is not TBK paying this, but the club (i.e. you and me). It would not be too far a push to suggest that the share issue is in mind to pay for this. David Hinchcliffe (DH) (BK's laywer who wrote the email) tries to argue with D&P why they are taking out £3.5M from the £9.1M because it is money due to the club from other football clubs. How can you possibly include £3.5M of transfer payments due from other clubs for players previously sold into YOUR bid for the club. That is quite shocking. Instead DH asks why D&P are not giving TBK credit for saying they will meet the 2012-13 expected trading losses of around £10M. Again, why should this be relevant at all. If TBK take over the club for the start of 2012-13 and make a £10M loss in their first year, why should they be given any credit for funding this. In any event, again it looks likely that it will be the fans share issue that is funding this shortfall, not TBK investment. This is why the word "quantum" is being overly used these days. TBK bid is all pieced into future payments. It might all add up to around £9.1M, but it is clear that the cash offer is no more than £2M. While £2M is an improvement on their embarrassing £1.5M offer of the last round, it is still embarrassing and hardly going to be acceptable. Do TBK really believe that they should be allowed to purchase RFC for an initial investment of £2M, plus add-ons? D&P are well out of their depth in this administration. That much is a given. Have they made mistakes? You bet they have. Is it their fault TBK are not the owners of RFC? Absolutely NOT. That fault lies 100% purely and squarely with TBK and their failure to raise sufficient funds to buy the club in a professional manner. I hear that the Green consortium will be named PB by Monday, but having been caught out before I take that with a pinch of salt and ask others to do likewise. However time really is running out for TBK to come up with the cash up front that would buy them the club. They either put up a sensible cash up front bid of £8M and take our club forward with all their great ideas and fans share issue, a large democratic board, Rangers men in all significant positions. Or they give up trying to steal the club for a bargain basement price and then get the fans to pay for everything in later years and let/back the Green consortium get on with the job of ensuring there is a Rangers left to follow.

If the demo is to make TBK put in a genuine bid with the correct amount of up-front cash, then let me know where and when. If it is to continue to do their work for them and pressurise D&P into giving a consortium with no cash our great club, then im out.

The Rangers QC has read the report and is very confident of a complete overturn of all convictions against the club.

I disagree that a large number of our usual attendees at Ibrox are also vociferous online. That is my argument. My proof is in my own dealings with many fans and fans reps that do go as explained earlier. If you choose to disagree with that argument, that is your want. However you can't really argue against it by suggesting that most of them are online without any evidence to back it up. I'm not having a pop at you for not going to games, nor do I think that makes you less a fan or your opinions less valid, but I think your argument lacks any foundation.

Do you go to games Danny? If so, do you go as part of a group or on your own? I travel on 2 RSC buses, one to Ibrox and another to away games. I am also involved in the RFWG, which in turn brings me into contact with a large number of Rangers fans at meetings and in private emails. I go to a lot of Rangers related functions, both at Ibrox and elsewhere, and love to discuss our great club with other Rangers fans, a bit like what happens online every day. What I am saying is that when I meet other Rangers fans in person, I believe we are far more united as fans and share many similar goals for our club. When I go online, I see a very different type of Rangers fan.

I will add that when questioned he admitted that he found this out in October and failed to act, even though it was cut and dried, until after CW had done a runner and we were in admin. Between October and February, the SFA and CW's lawyers had merely exchanged a letter or two. Not quite the kind of outrage and moral high-horsiness we have been subjected to since.

He was banned for 7 years in 2000. Therefore he was still banned in 2007. Taking over 4 years later in 2011 is within 5 years and there is his problem. That is the rules as explained to me in person by Stewart Regan, and one can only assume he knows his own rules surely? I mean he had the rulebook with wee sticky pages marking out the well thumbed page right in front of us for goodness sake, it must be accurate!!

The way I hear it the 2 (or perhaps 3) have good cash, but no commitment to put big cash in, just a bit of cash. If they actually had the numbers of Knights they told everybody at the start they had they should have been home and hosed weeks ago. That was the problem, and one they failed to admit to, even right up to the end of last week. It was always some elses fault. Personally, I liked the idea of good Rangers men taking over the club, but the more that comes out, the more I feel we have really dodged a bullet on this one as TBK have been unable to do what they said they already had done. If anyone is still unsure, ask why a group that talked of offering Murray £28M last May in a bid to stop CW taking over, can only muster £1.5M the following May? It doesnt pass the sniff test.