calscot

Seems to me that if Whyte is not fit and proper then it should be the SFA and SPL who should be punished for allowing him to do what he did to Rangers. By branding him as such, they are saying that they have been negligent and/or incompetent for the last nine months. I really can't see how Rangers can be fairly punished for this.

I would bet we don't owe ticketus 24M: I think it's more like 37M - they will be charging a lot for the loan. To be pedantic we owe them no money - they just own about 75,000 season tickets.

That's a bit unfair - do you think the Blue Knights will donate instead of getting shares or any other rich person interested? Why should the rich get assets and control for their money and your average Joe just get a fuzzy feeling that he's helped? Have you donated at least a grand? I very much doubt it. If it's all the same then it means Celtic fans "donated" £13M at a minimum of £650 a pop. Maybe they just love their club more - or maybe getting shares in return is different somehow... I'd like to see some people saying this stuff put their money where their mouth is.

Struggling to pay at the moment as PayPal charge you so left that one as I'd rather Rangers get all the money, and my phone banking should be called "on hold forever" banking. The internet banking should also be called, "we put so many stupid rules in our password choice that you won't be able to remember it and so access will be suspended" banking.

PS The main place I want us to be is just on a level financial pegging with Celtic.

I think the biggest problem is the What's In It For Me factor. I wouldn't want anyone creaming off the club's profits. The ideal would be something like a £40M investment which gives a debt free Rangers and includes a small investment in the playing squad. Then the club turned around to run within its means and therefore perpetually debt free. So a new owner would need to invest £40M of his/their money for absolutely no return when they could get up to 7% before tax from copper bottomed government bonds - that's £2.8M a year. So to be honest we probably need someone a bit like SDM... Someone who wants to be in the limelight, instantly famous, and who will not only enjoy that but probably use it to seal other big deals that make them a lot of money. A bit like investing in a posh car and designer suit, watch and pen for business deals. You don't get money from directly them but it builds your image for doing business. Then they could always make some money slightly indirectly eg tender out Ibrox contracts to their own start up companies and use the guaranteed turnover to increase those operations. As such we actually need someone with the kind of wealth that SDM had - over £500M so that Rangers are an affordable indulgence. I think the reality is that we'll get someone like the BKs who haven't enough wealth to pay the debt and so make the club scrabble around for years, working within meagre means while the debt is reduced. They'll have grandiose ideas but without the ability to achieve them. I can see us ending up fiscally prudent but with one depressing transfer window after another, European football a footnote and struggling to do much domestically against a more affluent and extravagant rival who are able to take quite a few more risks with their spending and debt. We could end up back in the early eighties...

If one ever does, then I'm sure a quick apology should sort it out...

I wasn't talking about the veracity of the scheme, just that SDM looked pretty much like to be telling the truth. I would have thought it was reasonably obvious. Basically we have "pretended" the payments were discretionary but left little evidence for it. They are trying to prove that we were pretending possibly with evidence and possibly just trying to convince the judges that the implied contract is there due to it being beyond reasonable thinking that the payments could be discretionary given the nature of them. There may be scraps of evidence but they are probably vague and interpretative. If there was concrete evidence, the case would have been against us ages ago. Basically the verdict will be whether the tribunal thinks we are lying or not. The danger is, that it's hard to believe we're not. BTW this "lying" is not related to what SDM said in the article. Not from his words in that article. He didn't say anything about a letter. SDM may usually lie constantly but in that article he stuck with the facts. Me? Never intentionally. I'm very aware of it when it happens and tend to point it out when it appears to be happening. I like to get to the nitty gritty; however, find many others try to avoid it to protect their entrenched positions or to just score points...

If you think that then you've completely missed the point - and if you agree with me so much then maybe you should have just said so. It's funny you say you know what a share is yet your whole argument is based mainly on the premise that shares and fresh air are the same thing. No-one ever contested that there would be less raised on a donation basis than a share issue - in fact it's obvious, it's just you were just arguing that they were the exactly the same thing and so you conclude that those who pledged to buy shares were insincere on the evidence of the lower amount. We're not arguing about the effect, we're arguing about the cause... get it?

We may be arguing semantics: you need to take responsibility for decisions, I think that's different from "blame". We all make decisions based on trusted advice: if someone convinces you to take their advice and it turns out to be crap, it's natural to blame them.

After watching the Ireland v Scotland game, I'm not sure rugby players are tough enough for football - a slight tug on the arm and they go down like a sack of potatoes and get a guy sent off. If that Irish guy was playing for Rangers, he would now be facing a retrospective two game ban for simulation...

Looking at it, if he is wrong, I would say someone else IS to blame. He is only complicit in taking the risk.

I thought rather than a contract, it was a letter to the player implying that the player would be entitled to the money which could possibly be construed as a kind of contract.

Can't see where he could be lying. What he's said is the truth. You can't do an EBT at all if it's contractual and the trusts were mentioned every year in the accounts. The auditors did sign off every year. That's the facts of the case.

Could be offensive to those good ol' boys from the south... Like calling Scots, Limeys with the association that we're English.

There doesn't need to be a share issue for fans to assert themselves - a boycott of season tickets would do it.

I think due to their fingers being burnt with Bosman that you are probably correct but UEFA would have to take it into account and the EU would have to act if a strong case was brought to them. I can't see why you can't have clubs just creating their own leagues left, right and centre. Sounds perfectly legal to me - they just wouldn't come under the umbrella of the current bodies. I can't believe there are laws to restrict sport; however, I'd agree that Associations are allowed to have reasonable, binding rules like this. However, in this case you're bound by the rules of your Association, they are not the laws themselves. Agreed. I think I read it on here but may have got the wrong end of the stick... This is the only source I can find of such info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football_clubs_playing_in_the_league_of_another_country

I read this but can't find it now but maybe this should suffice: http://cardiff-city.blogspot.com/2012/01/one-game-away-from-european-football.html "One of the bonuses of being in the Carling Cup Final a chance of European football if we were to win, wouldnâ??t that be great. The Welsh FA and English FA are to hold talks with UEFA to confirm Cardiff City could take the Europa League spot offered to the winner. The three came to an agreement when the Bluebirds reached the 2008 FA Cup Final, at the time it was reported the Welshman would have a wild card to play in the same competition."

I don't think the £24.4< will be reduced by a penny. I think he's talking about a vast reduction in the terms which sound extortionate - hence my reference to Wonga.com. It's probably more like getting a sub prime lender to start charging you pretty shit but more close to normal banking rates.

Don't disagree with any of that...

If putting in 20 game winning streaks was easy for either of the OF they'd be doing it all the time. I would say that that winning streak would have put a dent in any Rangers manager's 9 point lead and probably brought it back to parity. After a good run you usually get a less than good one unless your a team that is good enough to accumulate over 100 points in a season which doesn't happen often - once in the SPL I think. Lennon had his bad run at the beginning, it's evened out a bit now and you could extrapolate their points to 95 for the season - which would win the league most years or at least take you very close in others. I would expect Walter Smith to be doing quite well have that kind of total in a normal season - this season it would be a miracle, even if we didn't experience as dramatic a "freefall". But if he did, we'd still be 10 points behind. People always talk as if this year's non-OF SPL's competition is the worst ever. Maybe it is but you are limited by your environment. We can only really gauge managers for their performance in the league they are in and I think Lennon has shown that if nothing else he's not shit at getting a reasonable amount of points on the board. Advocaat, Eck and PLG have all done worse in some seasons.

But can you not sometimes throw a bit more in to save the original money? Sometimes it pays to do so.

But is part of the point that you have resources for a very long law suit with hardly affecting your business, while Rangers would be in turmoil for years? Again. So they have a lot of leverage over us to force us to deal with them in a way where we can give them their money back with plenty of interest... If you can do that to recover your money with profit, then why not do it?

I thought to sell the company without shareholders' permission, it would have to be as a newco, therefore the oldco no longer exists and so the shareholders have nothing. That way they are looking after the creditors and so need no permission as the company will have been compulsory liquidated in any case. I'm speculating in this case, that to preserve oldco they must have Craig Whyte's permission to sell his shares and to get that he'd want a pay-off. I would guess other shares would be intact but worth pro-rata of the company's worth. If the new owners get to 90% of the shares they can compulsory purchase all the other shares, which at this time will be almost nothing. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I see you point and maybe it's just me but I have big doubts that the majority of pledgers see it in the same way as you when it comes to putting their hand in their pocket. The proof of the pudding will be in how much is raised. I doubt it will approach 8 figures. We'll see.