calscot

And as I keep trying to explain, the reason we are in administration is purely due it being pretty much the only way of surviving the big tax bill - via a CVA or liquidation/newco. CW knew that and decided he was man enough and mean enough to do a very dirty job and get paid handsomely for it. The big tax case is the cause, the rest is just the effect. I doubt many of us bought into the "irresponsible dream" as we all assumed the spending was affordable or that it was out of Murray's pocket. EBT's are not illegal but they always had the possibility of the tax being called in with huge penalties and interest. It's unlikely the EBT's were run as the tax man intended and it all hinged on the dodgy premise that the payments were discretionary rather than obligatory. Murray was stupid for employing the EBT's as they were just too dodgy and risky and the consequences too dire for the club. He probably thought he'd gotten away with it and so used them again and again as the normal way of payment of a large slice of the top wages. He was basically playing Russian Roulette with the club. Murray sold up for a pound to the first person that came along as he knew the BTC was looming and he didn't want to be the one to deal with it and his companies couldn't afford any liabilities they may have had due to being guarantors. With the BTC the club was a poisoned chalice (which he concocted) and he wanted rid. Whyte just took advantage of the opportunity of the situation but his best case scenario hasn't crystallised - CVA, sale and big sum for his shares.

I think it could be in our favour to not transfer the JJB contract as we received a big lump sum to start with. Basically the contract was equivalent of something like £4.5m a year but we're now only receiving £3m a year as we have already had the initial payment. A bit mercenary but then JJB are in trouble and are not marketing our kit very well.

In accepted social etiquette where I come from the answer is, "Yes". Apologising for injuring another party in some way is normal even if the injuring is accidental. Not only is it a gesture of contrition for the injury caused, it gives the implication that there was no malice intended and it was indeed purely involuntary. Not apologising gives a big suggestion that either the act of injury was deliberate or due to not caring about the injury the person doing the injuring could be deliberately reckless about the well-being of others around them implying an insufficient duty of care to others around them. However, he is "entitled" to not apologise and is not legally obliged to do so... :fish: It all depends on your moral code and whether it is based on philosophy or legality.

I think with low bids like that we might be in danger of disappearing forever. Surely to be safely accepted the CVA or newco must offer more in the pot than what would be realised by auctioning off all the individual assets in the most lucrative way? I would guess that tens of millions could be raised in this way even though a large stadium in the middle of a waste-ground in Govan is not worth much on the open market except as a Rangers FC football stadium. I personally was expecting bids of around the £20m mark which could still only be worth 15p in the pound. And to be honest, I think a debt free Rangers must be worth much more than that - it seems like a bargain to me. Just ask Dave King who put £20m in for bugger all a while back. The weird thing is that if the 200k people who went to Manchester put up £100 each they could pay that and own the club. Add in plenty of people like myself who didn't go but would easily put up £100 and you've got some working capital too. I feel TBK are doing a bit of a CW and trying to buy the club for effectively nothing and then make the fans pay for it while they then own the club and make money from it. I can see them buying it for £10m odd and then converting that into a loan, doing a fan share issue in return for a ridiculously small percentage of the club and using that as working capital. Meanwhile the loan gets repaid with interest from the revenue from season tickets. What we really needed was someone trustworthy to start a Rangers company with a cast iron constitution and sell 100,000 shares at £250 each with one share per person. Then offer to take over Rangers for say £15 in a CVA and have £10m left over to work with. Perhaps those shareholders could also legally underwrite another £100 after six months giving securities to take out up to £10m of credit from somewhere if an emergency arose.

So a good question would be - did he apologise?

Was that his fags falling out of his pocket?

You have a point, but I made the same point with Nacho Novo's "stamp" some years ago. That looked at least 10 times more deliberate than Novo especially as he unnaturally steps to the side - and has a hell of a lot of previous. Memory and peripheral vision could help him without looking directly - he doesn't have to be accurate as it's not exactly a big deal if he misses. Besides look at the psycho look in his eyes and on his face... I'm pretty sure Nacho was innocent and he was hammered for it.

Why would we ALL be looking forward to a non-Rangers game and it's even non-Scottish game? To me it's a Mickey Mouse game with no real relevance due to the Arab money paying for a Disney like team. It's this kind of fake, fantasy league stuff of our near neighbours that's helping to kill the Scottish game - and Rangers. I don't see why Scottish football fans should subscribe to it. My opinion... :fish:

Teach self defence classes?

I think the biggest difference is the liquidation event. This means you are saying the new company has nothing to do with the old company and so any debts are not valid. By saying that, if you have nothing to do with the old company then you also lose all the privileges that that company had - like memberships of associations etc. It's a double edged sword.

In one of the pictures there's a few guys that look like they're doing a Nazi salute - remember according to them, if it looks like one, it is one.

I'm all for it, I just hope everyone is too, otherwise what's the point? I put £50 into the fighting fund which may not be very much, but if all the people who went to Manchester did the same, and also plenty who didn't go, then we'd have over £10m in the fund. If you can afford £100-200 to go to Manchester you can afford 50 quid to save your club. There's just not enough people walking the walk. There's a hard core of people doing something for the club but there seems to be a vast majority who just can't be bothered beyond having a moan. Some of the stuff is easy and actually saves you money - don't go to away games, cancel your Sky deal and don't go to MacDee's. How hard can it be?

Thing is: are people going to follow through with the boycott of these companies? The only one I patronise regularly is Tesco. If 10k people stopped spending £100 a week there then they'd lose £1m a week in turnover. That could so easily be multiplied by about 10. Imagine them losing £10m a week for 10 weeks - £100m? It would really make them sit up and take notice. However, I really can't see it happening as people just don't follow through on these things and it needs mass participation to make an impact. I really can't see people cancelling Sky as I think too many people would miss the EPL more than they want to support their club. The evidence is there from the huge number who had a Sky subscription but not Setanta...

How can there be no vacancy? If Rangers are liquidated and kicked out the SPL, no matter the relegation scenario, there will be one less club in the SPL leading to one less club in the SFL = vacancy! Simple, simple stuff. I think he's forgotten that if you don't relegate a team to Div 1 then after one team being promoted, you have one less team in the league. 10 - 1 + 0 = 9. The other scenario is 10 - 2 + 1 = 9. No matter which way you do it you end up with the number 9. Why wouldn't they let us in Div 1?

It's the law of diminishing returns. There will eventually be a time when something breaks and the EPL will have to cope. Unless they also do some financial rules before then, it looks like it will collapse like the world economy. I can't see how it is sustainable. Popularity for anything waxes and wanes - but when something gets too big, the waning means it catastrophically collapses in on itself.

PPS I've had a look at the stats and noticed that between the 1-0 loss to Celtic and going into administration we won 4 and drew 1 out of the 5 games we played with 14 goals to 3. I would say that's an upward spiral or recovery of form. We then went on to lose 3 and win 1. After the wages have been sorted we've won 4 in a row. That 4 game form, post admin looks pretty much like a blip to me. Apart from that we had a bad 7 game run where we lost 11 points. In the 4 games post admin we lost 9 points. In the other 23 games we lost 4 points. I think that show two bad patches. One from lack of form - affected by the loss of Naismith and other players, the financial turmoil and Jelavic looking for a move. The other due to administration. Take away the financial turmoil and I believe we'd have been slightly above Celtic - despite the loss of Naismith, Jelavic and others, Ally not being able to bring the players he wanted and having a much smaller squad than Celtic.

PS People keep saying about we were on a downward spiral before administration - how do they know that would continue. After all we were in an upward spiral before the downward one - spirals obviously change direction. When a team has shown they can play consistently well, it's a bit strange to assume that a bad patch will never end.

This "crumbling" is a myth. We had a fantastic run followed by a mediocre run - pretty normal and worked out about average for a season where we either win the league or come close. They had a mediocre run followed by a fantastic run which evened things up. They overtook us by a few points but if we hadn't gone into administration there is all probability we'd have made that ground back up following the end of their good run. Just after administration we lost 9 points in 4 games when even during a mediocre run you wouldn't expect us to lose more than about three. Admin also lost us our best player with our previous best player injured for the season. If you give us 16 points back we'd be two points behind with an OF game to go. That's despite them having a much bigger and deeper squad, less crucial injuries, not selling their best striker and pressurising the referees into giving them quite a few advantageous decisions - and their players getting full pay. Looking at that, I can't see how Lennon's done all that well this season. At best he's been mediocre when you count the cups, Europe and our demise.

The problem with the BTC is that (although this is according to CW) HMRC said they if they lost they would appeal, appeal and appeal again. So although the tax bill was only "potentially" there, HMRC would have made it impossible for Rangers to trade normally for years and then could still be hit with an even bigger bill. The only way out of the tax hole seems to be cutting a deal with HMRC or going into administration and putting massive pressure for a CVA or liquidating and starting a newco with no tax liability. That is why the only taker from SDM was CW and now we have potentially six interested parties. HMRC wouldn't deal and so CW had no recourse but to go for administration. In that scenario, why would he want to invest any of his own money? I believe he wanted to delay administration until the case was due to give a verdict and that's why he used the tax money. However, HMRC called his hand earlier than he expected but the result is pretty much the same - especially as the tax verdict has still not been given. So what would have happened had CW not taken over? Would we really have avoided administration? Maybe this season but how about the next? What if we lose the tax case and receive a £75m bill? How would we have paid it? It seems to me that because of the EBT's combined with the intractable actions and aims of HMRC, administration was absolutely necessary for us to survive but only one person was willing to take the flack for that - and I think he'll want quite a few million for his trouble and strife. The fact is that we wouldn't even be having this debate if it wasn't for the EBT's. The most likely scenario would be TWKs taking us over by borrowing a load of money and then floating a share issue. We'd probably still be about £18m in debt but stable with new owners who would have acquired the club for a song.

The EBT is the by far the main issue - in fact it's really the ONLY issue with all others being the EFFECT of this issue. It is WHY CW bought the club and WHY he didn't pay the tax - administration, CVA/liquidation and sale were his game plan BECAUSE of the BTC, and not paying taxes just allowed him to keep the club going with no cash input of his own and no real cash flow. EBTs are still as much of an issue as any other including the unpaid tax. Let's get this straight - we would be totally financially stable except for a potential £75m tax bill. I don't know what bit of that you don't get.

Is that one man SDM or CW? It's SDM's deliberate decision not to pay tax on the EBT's that directly led us to the position we are in and opened the door for CW.

Why? If you take away the BTC and Whyte, I can't see why we'd not qualify? Ignoring BTC and before Whyte the impression is that we were not making a loss and had zero ownership investment. Our wages were also less than 55% of turnover. Where would we not qualify? I agree this season's shambles and the BTC make it an exceptional year but surely if we have new owners either by CVA or liquidation we'll be run in a way to not make huge losses. If we joined next season (I know this won't actually happen) we would be allowed 12M of ownership investment over three years and losses of 4m, 3m and then 2m perpetually. I'm sure that would be well achievable for us without the burden of the potential tax debt.

You've got to admit that at the moment it would hurt them far more than it would hurt us. But do we want to also cut off our own nose to spite them? The long term problem in making a more evenly financed league is that our nation would become a European minnow.

That could be quite funny if it happened. It would be pretty good for us. Imagine all the clubs attendances being halved including Celtic while our fans fill the stadium and boycott away matches. Not only would we be the strongest club financially by miles, the other clubs would have to start eating humble pie as each one goes bankrupt and wants back in the SPL - including Celtic. Pity it's complete bullshit.

Thing is, it's soooo easy not to buy a Vauxhall... I'm with Jezza on that one. Glad Mercedes aren't the sponsors - I've just ordered one for delivery in June. I've chosen blue of course!