SUPPORTERS have expressed fresh fears over Rangers' finances as it emerged former chief executive Charles Green netted more than £200,000 in severance pay.

 

The former chief executive's payment was part of a near £1 million annual remuneration package for quitting the Ibrox board.

The extent of the payments to the man who aimed to rescue the club from the clutches of disgraced former owner Craig Whyte was laid bare in the accounts for the 13 months to June.

They show the club has been haemorrhaging more than £1m a month and that despite raising £35m in finance, including a share offering snapped up by fans, it has just £11m in cash.

Fans have now raised serious concerns the business may go back into administration.

The first annual report of Rangers International Football Club plc shows that before Mr Green quit as chief executive in April, he had been paid £933,376, including a severance payment of £217,850. His bonus of £360,000 eclipsed his salary of £333,077.

Mr Green's counterpart at Celtic, Peter Lawwell, also received just short of £1m in the 12 months to June 2012, though his club are in the top flight of Scottish football.

Mr Green's severance payment came even though he stepped down as chief executive in April following an apparently racist remark he made about former colleague Imran Ahmad and the furore over alleged links with disgraced former owner Whyte, which were hotly refuted.

Mr Green, 60, who led a consortium to buy the assets of the club last summer, prompted protests after he was subsequently brought in as a consultant, but had his contract terminated 18 days later.

Over the 13-month period, the directors of RIFC received £1.6m in remuneration while the club was languishing in the Third Division, the bottom tier of Scottish football.

By comparison, Celtic, with lucrative European football, paid its board £1.4m in the 12 months to June 2012.

Rangers' finance director Brian Stockbridge took home £409,308, with half of that amount believed to be in bonus payments. Celtic's counterpart Eric Riley received £248,216 in 2012. Manager Ally McCoist's reward for his work in winning promotion from the Third Division was total remuneration of £825,000.

At the weekend Mr McCoist said he and his management team had agreed a wage cut to safeguard the club's financial future, describing it as "the right thing to do".

It further emerged company auditors Deloitte were paid £90,000 for audit work but amassed more than six times that (£594,000) in additional fees for non-audit advisory work.

The non-audit fees include £314,000 for corporate finance services in relation to the flotation on the stock market, £128,000 for 'accounting investigation services', £117,000 for 'other tax advisory services' and £35,000 in 'audit-related assurance services'.

Andy Kerr, president of the Rangers Supporters Assembly, said of the remuneration package to Mr Green: "I think this perpetuates the view they were certainly looking after themselves. This is the type of thing people will be honing in on during the AGM.

"A lot of the noise has been about the appropriateness over where the money is going, payments and what not.

"In the wider picture it is part of the evidence that says no matter what happened, these guys saw themselves all right with the club's money, or rather, our money.

"To have so little money left after all the amounts that were transacted over that period is perhaps the biggest concern. A lot of that cash came from the ordinary fans who wanted the club to grow and develop, to get us as far away from the problems of the past as we could.

"If you look at the income expenditure profile right now you are wondering how long it will be before we are starting to knock on that door (insolvency) again."

Green, according to the RIFC statement to the Stock Exchange, "no longer has a notifiable interest in the company's share capital".

The Stock Exchange had been informed by RIFC in June that Green would not be able to dispose of his shareholding until the end of the year.

In August bus company enterpreneur Sandy Easdale said he held the largest shareholding at Rangers after securing a "binding agreement" to buy the shares of Mr Green.

The business side of Rangers posted turnover of £19.1m, most of which came from gate receipts and hospitality income. The player wage bill fell over the period, but so did sponsorship and media earnings.