AN American tycoon who is "not a big soccer fan" has emerged as one of the four bidders for Rangers.
Bill Miller, chairman of the world's largest manufacturer of towing and recovery equipment, is best known in US motor racing circles for his support of NASCAR and IndyCar events.
But he has also built a reputation in business circles of "resurrecting dead giants".
His Tennessee-based Miller Industries employs 2000 people and made $109.4 million (£68.9m) in sales in the last three months of 2011 alone– up by a third on the previous quarter – and registered a gross profits of $16.3m (£10.2m).
Mr Miller, 65, had been a potential investor with the US and UK consortium involving Club 9 Sports, which pulled out of the bidding shortly before Wednesday's deadline.
One close associate says he is not a big football fan but would see turning around Rangers as a big opportunity.
"He made his wealth by seeing opportunities to fix troubled assets. He turns them into healthy, prospering companies by growing revenues and controlling costs. He is a good turnaround artist," he said.
"While he enjoys various sports – yachting, racing, golf – he is not a big soccer fan. What I believe he recognises is the great value of a rare, global brand and the international future of soccer. He is a smart businessman with significant wealth and he is exploring a variety of ways to exit administration.
"His goal is to fix the problems and allow Rangers and all the supporters to have a healthy, strong future.
"I imagine he would not be for anything that harms fans and the club. He would be looking for a long-term solution so this unfortunate situation would not happen again."
Detroit-born Mr Miller followed his father into one of the city's car manufacturing plants and harboured early ambitions to become a line supervisor at Ford.
But his high school guidance councillor saw his potential and suggested he go to college. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned a degree in engineering, and later got an MBA.
He went on to work for a variety of large companies, including Bendix Corporation, Neptune International, Wheelabrator-Frye, and AlliedSignal. In each case, he found work fixing troubled units within the companies, and in the course of this caught the entrepreneurial bug himself.
Mr Miller told Forbes magazine: "The big companies weren't geared toward the shareholders. They were geared toward a bureaucracy."
His first position at the helm of a company came in February 1987, when he assumed the presidency of Flow Measurement, a maker of industrial flow meters. Miller Industries was formed by finding a once-great brand name and resurrecting it.
First he bought Holmes, a bankrupt company that had once held a 75% share of the tow-truck industry in the United States. Soon after he purchased Challenger and Century. Together the three became part of the newly formed Miller Group – for a total price of $25m, of which he borrowed $20m.
He soon shut down three of the five existing production factories and got rid of some 300 distributors.
In 1996, Miller acquired two European subsidiaries, tow truck makers Jige in France and Boniface Engineering in the UK. Later they bought Vulcan International, a leading US maker of towing equipment.
Between July 1996 and July 1997, Miller Industries acquired 10 towing equipment distributors and was ranked ninth in Forbes magazine's Best Small Companies list.
In February, 1996, Mr Miller created RoadOne, a towing service company and in less than six months had acquired 34 towing service companies with combined historic revenues of $80m annually. RoadOne was, from the beginning, the largest towing company in the US, with service in 15 states. But nine years later RoadOne was filed for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the federal bankruptcy laws.
In May, 1997, Robert Luke of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution wrote: "Wall Street thinks Miller Industries can maintain the momentum, much like Bill Gates has at software giant Microsoft."
Whereas Microsoft's shares were trading at 45 times estimated 1997 profits, Miller Industries' stock was trading as high as 65 times earnings.
Now $56m of Miller's $412.7m in 2011 sales were overseas. It exports primarily to European countries, with England and France receiving the most.
The company also has distribution centres in Australia, Japan, Puerto Rico and South Africa.
Mr Miller was chief executive of Team Sports Entertainment, which was behind an ill-fated NASCAR rival.
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