bossy

The problem with all these consortiums is that they are trying to enlist the support - knowing that there is a general malaise - but without actually offering us anything and without really telling us what their intentions are should they eventually get control. In addition, it does seem that they are trying to get control on the cheap. And it is always the same players and the same story.

So David, you want the support to boycott the club? Tell us what the risks are. What happens if you are successful and what happens if you are not? What is your vision for the club going forward? Where does the support fit into that vision? How are things going to be different if you get control.

You want a boycott? Give us a compelling reason to go down that road. And just being unhappy with the current board is not a compelling reason to try to bring the club to its knees so that you can buy it on the cheap.

I would think that Murray had the most obvious financial interest, irrespective of claiming he was confident of winning TBTC, strange way of showing his faith in winning by selling for a pound, however he was of course duped as where everyone else.

David Murray did not sell for a pound. He sold for £18 million which was the amount of debt that got wiped off his balance sheet.

There is a tendency to see Ticketus as a bogeyman. I am not convinced that is true. Certainly, they made an expensive mistake. But they would not be the first or last company to do that. Just ask Hewlett Packard who made an $8.8 billion mistake with the Autonomy acquisition. Furthermore, we do not know whether or not Ticketus made that famous phone call. Maybe they did but just happened to speak to the wrong person.

I think the truth with regard to Ticketus is somewhat simpler. They saw an opportunity to do a great deal with a very well supported club and with whom they had done business before. Perhaps the details of just how they ended up getting burned will come out in due course and, hopefully, along with many other details of just what happened at Ibrox as the Crown Office develop their case against those already indicted and as other police investigations proceed.

There are too many agendas and too much infighting in all of this.

I am a Trust member and will remain a trust member. I also own my shares via the RST. That will not change.

However, I no longer have any confidence that meaningful supporter representation will ever happen. For me, this CIC and SD scheme is just another groupuscule with their own agenda. There will be lots of noise but, essentially, it will go nowhere. The same characters arguing over the same old ground.

Seems to that BuyRangers has the merit of being in existence and actually owning shares whereas this new 'scheme' is still at the proposal stage. If supporters are really interested in owning the club - which I personally doubt - then why bother setting up an alternative scheme?

I haven't got a clue what the scheme is all about, but i'll no doubt throw money at it anyway.

Is there a scheme or are we still at the words stage?

Has anything concrete been set up?

Has any scheme been registered with the appropriate authorities?

Do we know who will be entrusted with supporter's money?

Will supporters have any way of influencing how their investment is used?

I can't speak for the board or the auditors nor would you expect me to but in answer to your last two questions: the management letter was directed to me as Secretary in the first instance, so obviously that would be a "yes" and "no" I did not have any other contact with the firm concerned before, during or after my involvement with RST. I am sure they will be happy to confirm that if required.

 

I hope that's helpful.

I am surprised that you don't know the answers to the first two questions.

Is it normal for the ML to be directed to the Secretary? As an ML normally contains comments on the accounting and control environment I would have thought it should be directed to the Treasurer.

If you think (wrongly) that the RST auditors would allow the Secretary to write an email for them, then that does not say a great deal for the auditors. Of course, as you well know , that is not true. I did not write the auditors email and I can prove that as well. If you wish I will publish the email that I sent them and their letter in full, though the vast majority has already been published. I expressed surprise to the auditors that certain matters had not been included in the first draft of their report and they then re-drafted it in their own words and I must admit that even I was surprised at the strength of what they said. If they had thought that my concerns were misplaced then no doubt they would have responded accordingly.

 

So, essentially, the auditors redrafted their report (presumably their management letter) as a result of your comments.

Did you inform anyone else on the RST Board that you had a conversation with the auditors which caused them to redraft their ML?

Did anyone else on the RST Board agree with your comments?

Did the auditors consult with any other Board members prior to the redraft?

When you saw the redraft, had the auditors shown it to any other Board members?

Did your role on the Board require direct contact with the auditors?

Did you have any contact with these auditors from any other professional activity?

Personally, I don't really understand why the RST didn't have a mechanism already in place for the fans to buy the club out of administration. I might be completely wrong, but it strikes me that while the RST has always been well meaning and had the best intentions of developing fan ownership, when push came to shove and the club was there for the taking, the necessary mechanism simply wasn't in place. That then says to me that there was not only a lack of foresight, but also a lack of real tangible drive towards the Trust's ultimate goals in the years leading up to administration and it was a good number of years too.

 

I'm at the point now where I don't know what to think about fan ownership. I used to think it was a pipe dream and one that wasn't even necessarily the right way for our club to go, but now I'm not so sure. The one thing I will say, is that the trust really need some better advice than what they got when investing £250k in the IPO because that really was not good value for money in terms of buying shares and (in retrospect) it would have been far more prudent to not jump in trusting Green & co's IPO, but hold off and buy in the market at a much lower price.

I agree with some of what you say. The problem with the RST is that they have very laudable aims but - a bit like Paul Murray and Jim McColl - when push comes to shove they just never seem to be there.

Actually, I am a supporter of the RST and a member. I also invested £500 through them at the time of the IPO. But I think they suffer from gross timidity and naivety when it comes to furthering their aims.

As much as I agree with fan ownership (at least in part), there would need to be a sea change on RFC fan opinion for it to work.

 

Sure perhaps the 'ideal' scheme isn't yet in place but I suspect without key people being involved (say Greig, Smith, McCoist, Jardine, Gough) then I doubt fans would place much trust in it.

In my opinion, the only way it would work is if some rich guy acquired the club and then started putting in place the processes for fan ownership with a staged sell back of his/her shares. It simply isn't going to work from the bottom up. There is no appetite in the support, the supporter organisations either are not interested or have no idea how to make it happen and the in-fighting is a major negative.

Now, if I won a couple of hundred million on the lottery I could and would make it happen ............

There is most certainly a double standard. Nobody is disputing that. However, the tax case had been floating around for some time before the media really got interested. In fact, it was only when David Murray left the scene. The media in Scotland is ever wary of powerful men. It is, I think, going to take more than some diligent digging by PJZ to counteract their fear of Lawwell.

The sad reality is that the majority of our support have no appetite for fan ownership. The only way it will ever happen is if it is imposed from above.

PJZ has reported his findings to a variety of authorities - who he is in regular contact with as he provides them constant updates on his findings - whether any of these agencies are Police Scotland - you would have to ask him yourself.

 

It should be borne in mind however his main thrust to date has been to prove allegations of State Aid. At some point' date=' should those allegations be upheld then the mechanism used to provide that State Aid, I think that will be the time to consider criminal accountability. Though if evidence of criminal conduct was identitfied in the documentation he has made public - I would imagine that would take priority for the Police Service.[/quote']

 

The problem is that State aid is not necessarily illegal. For example, the State bailed out a number of banks. That was not illegal. So we then have a couple of different issues.

 

The first is whether the various public bodies breached their own procedures and their own fiduciary responsibilities and whether any of those breaches give rise to criminal misconduct. The second is whether any State aid has breached either UK or European fair competition rules.

 

While it would be gratifying to see the media wading into this situation it isn't going to happen until there is a very solid and factual dossier which spells out where breaches of the law have occurred and supports these allegations with hard facts. I don't know PJZ but, from what I can see, he/she is doing some good work. However, it would appear to be early days as yet and a lot more will need to be done. The media are simply not going to latch on to something that could land them in court because the allegations are not properly supported and the police are not going to expend resources where they are not sure that a crime has been committed.

The various anomalies in this case Bossy are in the public domain - I thought our law enforcers were supposed to be pro-active these days. Or does that just cover naughty words on footie forums ?

If no laws have been broken then how can they be pro-active? Have you or anybody else lodged a formal criminal complaint?

Have Celtic and/or the various public bodies, councils, banks, etc. actually engaged in illegal behaviour? Because a formal criminal complaint and court case will probably be needed to force the media to break cover.

Thank you for that information although I am not certain that Mr Quinn would have been directly involved as he joined the BoE as an economist which was his PhD.

 

My comment was simply based on the fact that he is qualified as an economist and had experience with the IMF as well as the BoE and as Chairman of the Celtic plc.

 

The fact it is obvious where his allegiance would lie in Glasgow terms is another matter altogether and I make no comment on that, other than what I said about him recusing himself from any discussions involving Rangers.

"Brian Quinn, 68, is best known today as the chairman of Celtic plc, the holding company for the Glasgow football club. But he was senior banking supervisor when the Bank of Credit and Commerce International collapsed with £7 billion of undeclared debts in 1991, leaving thousands of depositors out of pocket."

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2005/jun/12/accounts.business1

I have no doubt that Brian Quinn is eminently qualified for the position on UEFA's Financial Fair Play Board. After all, he was the Bank of England regulator who was asleep at the wheel while the BCCI scandal started to unfold.

There are a number of issues arising from this discussion where we do not really have a lot of clarity as to who was pushing for what:

1. The 'five way agreement" was clearly an attempt to coerce Rangers into accepting a punitive settlement and both the SFA and the SPL were complicit in attempting to extract their pound of flesh.

2. The transfer embargo was found in the Court of Session to be beyond the competence of the SFA and struck down yet Rangers were coerced into accepting it as the price of admission to the league.

3. The inquiry into double contracts went ahead despite the favourable (to Rangers) finding of the FTT.

4. I still do not have clarity on what happened to prize money and transfer money that was owing to Rangers around the time we went into administration.

5. Both Hearts and Dunfermline have gone into administration since Rangers. Dundee, Motherwell, Livingstone and others went into administration prior to Rangers. Is there any reasonable consistency and basis for comparison in the way these clubs were treated as compared to Rangers?

I have no doubt that Regan, Doncaster, Longmuir, etc. etc. will all have a persuasive defence for what they did and why they did it. Personally, I have zero confidence or trust in any of them. They acted the way they did for their own reasons and the interests of Rangers and the Rangers support came a very distant second.

While it is important to remember those who died and were injured on that day, we should also remember the essential culpability of Rangers Football Club. That stairway was a death trap and the club knew it. Two years previously there had also been an 'incident' on the same stairway with several people injured. The club did nothing to render the stairway safe.

Sorry, I'm a late arrival to this thread and haven't read it all but do Celtic need Rangers? They've received all their season ticket money and they're still selling tickets to the general public. All that they're missing out on is merchandise money from the pie stalls.

Celtic have a problem in that their season ticket sales are down 23% over a five year period and their average gates down about 19% over the same period. To what extent is this to do with Rangers we don't know. Their 2014 numbers will give us a much better indication of the financial impact of not having Rangers in the same league.

Of course, the advantage to Celtic of not having Rangers in the same league is access to the CL and they have clearly made the most of it. But what happens if they fail to qualify next year and their ticket sales are down?

Rangers are in somewhat of a different situation. Our gates have held up much better despite being relegated to the lowest division. Our problem is more one of mismanagement than it is structural. On the face of it, Celtic appear to have a structural problem in that 20% of their gates have disappeared despite no real change in their league or European situation.

I hate Celtic more than I ever have and I am certainly not missing the games against them. Of course we want to play top class football but the place to do that is in Europe. If Celtic were to disappear without trace tomorrow I personally would not shed a tear.

And, from the short time I spent posting on Pie & Bovril, I don't have a lot of time for the fans of any of the other teams either. You would have difficulty in finding a more narrow minded, poisonous and bigoted bunch of people.

My main regret is that we have not found a way out of the cesspit that is Scottish football.

I can certainly shed some light on that and in fact I am fairly sure that it is in the public domain.

 

Remember that it is up to the Club to report the facts to the SFA on their Annual Return or within 10 days of anything occurring that might be reportable.

 

To be clear, I am not an apologist for Regan, I am just giving you my interpretation of what happened.

 

That is why I have also said that should there be any doubt in the future about a director or proposed director of Rangers being fit and proper then I think you will find that Mr Regan will follow a much more robust procedure.

So much for the SFA's 'supervisory' role. Not worth the paper it was written on. In a different legal jurisdiction they would have been the subject of a class action lawsuit from the Rangers shareholders who were wiped out by Whyte.

With regard to a 'more robust procedure' ... does this just apply to Rangers (a bit like much of Vincent Lunny's work) or will it apply to every club? Also, given the ability to separate ownership from directorship and the club from the company that actually owns it, does the 'more robust procedure' have any substance?

Collymore is a well known moron.

Have to say I'm ultra-sceptical about the number of ST holders they claim to have.

Your comment notwithstanding, any business that admits losing 20% of its customers had to have a problem.

If you look at the 5 year summary in Celtic's 2013 annual report you will see that season ticket sales are down 23% compared to 2009 and average attendances are down 19% in the same period.

Those are the 'official' numbers. They may or may not be 'massaged' (e.g. promotions, free tickets, season ticket holders counted even if not there).

When you look at the numbers for Rangers, I think they suggest that our gates have been holding up better than those of Celtic. In other words, we need them less than they need us.

A lot of people forget that in those days there were no mobile phones so it was a day of complete torture waiting to hear from loved ones (my dad in my case who always came down stairway 13, who thankfully had left a bit early). Loads of people didn't know anything about it and went straight to the pub. So news didn't travel fast in those days. It was a horrible day.

I was in the Rangers End that day. As we exited Ibrox, we knew that something had happened but had no idea of the enormity. It took me about an hour and a half to get home to find my mother in a total state. Like you say, no mobile phones.