AROUND Rangers the devil is always in the detail.

Those who follow the club have grown used to their day beginning with 7am announcements from the Stock Exchange. As far as most supporters were concerned the latest followed an established path by delivering a blow to the solar plexus before breakfast. More than 90 percent of Rangers is not owned by Mike Ashley but he has inveigled his way into the club's business operation and by successfully offering another £10m in loans he is more deeply embedded than ever.

Ashley has taken hold at Rangers like Japanese knotweed. He will be just as difficult to remove. That the Rangers board accepted a loan from the owner of Sports Direct for the third time - £2m on October 27, another £1m on November 12, now another £5m up front and another £5m in waiting - came as no surprise to Dave King and the Douglas Park consortium, both of which want to oust the directors and finally apply some handbrakes to Ashley. How could the Rangers board approving Ashley's loan and conditions be any sort of surprise: it is his board. Derek Llambias was placed on it by Ashley. Barry Leach was placed on it by Ashley. Last month Rangers chairman David Somers was described by Laxey Partners chairman Colin Kingsnorth as "a wet fish agreeing anything Ashley wanted". That's three of the four plc board directors in Ashley's corner. The fourth, James Easdale, has consistently sided with Ashley, too. The infamous leaked email from Somers last month, in which he indicated that he and Easdale needed King to be kept out of Rangers in order to protect their own places on the board, suggested that Ashley could be sure of their obedience.

This Rangers board, clinging to its power, has until Monday, February 9, at the very latest, to call the Extraordinary General Meeting which is likely to bring it down. King has waited since January 16 for a meeting to be called at which he wants Somers, Easdale, Lambias and Leach swept out and himself, Paul Murray and John Gilligan appointed instead. Daily trading of stock makes the list of shareholders an ever-changing table and Ashley and directors determined to retain their places should not be underestimated, but those around the King camp are confident that they have the magic figure of more than 50 per cent prepared to vote for his resolutions at the meeting. If that confidence is vindicated, King, Murray and Gilligan will be on the board by the end of March.

There are two parallel and separate issues around Rangers: the financing of the club and control of its boardroom. Accepting Ashley's £10m loan package yesterday was a way of addressing the former but had no impact on the latter. Still, it was a deeply dispiriting development for those who want to reclaim and run Rangers because it burrowed Ashley ever deeper into the club's retail and commercial activities and it will not be quick, easy or cheap for King to disentangle him.

The devil is in the detail because the exact terms and conditions for Ashley's loan remain unknown. If King does secure control he will have to either continue working under the terms of Ashley's latest credit facility or else find the money to pay him off. Would there be an early repayment charge for doing that? That is one of the unknowns. Of the initial £5m going into the club from this new Sports Direct loan £3m will be used to pay off the loan advanced by another Ashley company, MASH Holdings, over October and November. That leaves £2m, a chunk of which will be eaten up by meeting the January payroll this Thursday. In no time at all Rangers will have to activate the second £10m loan.

The conditions might be described as onerous. Ashley already owned 49 percent of Rangers Retail and until the loan is repaid he has another 26 percent of it. Most of the shirt sponorship income from 2017 will go to Sports Direct, not Rangers, until the debt is cleared. And the loan is secured by a floating charge over the club's assets and fixed charges over Murray Park, Edmiston House, the Albion car park and Rangers' registered trademarks. For King, Park and their supporters that sounds like an awful lot to put at risk for the sake of £10m when Park's consortium was prepared to loan £6.5m, or more if required, which would be secured against only Murray Park and have no implications for the trademark or future revenue streams. The Park group had the money to see Rangers through to a share issue which the board announced at the Annual General Meeting in December. Instead Ashley's board went with Ashley's offer, and supporters were left to look with exasperation and horror at how coldly and cleverly he has tied things up before the possible takeover by King and his men.

It all sounded very different in August, 2012, when the Rangers chief executive at the time first trumpeted the idea of getting Ashley on board and reeled off the benefits he would bring to the club. "What Mike will do, subject to all the agreements going through, is bring the might of Sports Direct and that in itself, in my mind, will bring between £5m and £10m a year from merchandising revenues back into the club. That is far, far more worthwhile than Mike individually signing a cheque. It is about sustainability. It is about continuing revenues. It is about developing the brand and doing it worldwide." The words were Charles Green's.

£5m and £10m a year from Ashley? That's the level of money that's coming in all right, but not in merchandising revenue. As things stand Ashley has Rangers where he wants them and he is only £2m down - a figure which will be repaid to him - plus whatever he spent to buy his 8.9 percent stake. If King gets in, he will take charge of a club which looks like it has been reduced to a host organ for Sports Direct.