FIVE years ago today, Rangers went into administration. They have yet to fully recover. That the Ibrox club was on the brink of financial insolvency had been doing the rounds in and around Glasgow for months. For once, however, there was something concrete amid the radio phone-in speculation and taxi driver gossip. On Tuesday February 14, 2012, it became a reality.
It would become a significant signpost in a timeline that stretches back to the club’s first use of Employee Benefit Trusts in 2001 and all the way forward to the current day. The banking crisis of a few years earlier had obliterated the notion that certain pillars of the Scottish establishment were too powerful to crumble. Rangers were merely further confirmation of that.
The prospect of the then Scottish champions going into administration had been laid bare the previous day when Craig Whyte, Rangers’ owner of all of nine months, stood at the front door of Ibrox and, in a wavering voice, read aloud a statement revealing the club had lodged papers with the Court of Session in Edinburgh giving notice of their intention to file for administration. Rangers, he insisted to a growing cacophony of jeers from those gathered to listen, would “come out stronger”. He could hardly have been more wrong.
Rangers had 10 days in which to formalise that intention but only needed one. In the end, it became an unseemly rush to get it done. HMRC, pursuing Rangers over the alleged non-payment of around £9m in PAYE and VAT, had looked to appoint their own administrator but Whyte got in first.
In came Paul Clark and David Whitehouse of London-based Duff & Phelps, a choice that would have consequences that would reverberate over the next five years. Only this week they appeared in the news again, pursued by liquidators BDO in a £28m claim relating to their handling of the Rangers administration process. With Whyte set to appear in court in April on charges relating to his time at Ibrox, events from the period leading up to, and beyond, administration continue to leave a trail of repercussions.
Five years ago it would spark a chain of increasingly complex and often bizarre developments. It became a business story almost as much it did a football one, taking sports journalists more accustomed to writing about team news and injury updates into a whole new uncharted realm.
Rangers were docked 10 points – effectively ending any chance they had of retaining that season’s title – while their players and management staff agreed sizeable wage cuts and freezes that prevented the sort of wholesale redundancies that usually follow whenever a business is declared insolvent.
In the four months between administration and the club calling in the liquidators on June 12, when HMRC rejected the proposed CVA (Company Voluntary Arrangement), a raft of names appeared in the public domain as possible saviours of Rangers.
Bill Miller was the American “trucking tycoon” who introduced the concept of the “incubator” as part of his £11m offer for the club. Miller leant heavily on the sort of language usually reserved for medical dramas as he revealed his plans for taking the club out of administration via a CVA. In actual fact, what he was proposing through extensive use of quotation marks was the creation of a Newco, a term that would soon become familiar to all followers of Scottish football.
“In order to preserve the club's history, records, championships and assets, I will put the "heart" of the club into an "incubator" company while Duff & Phelps works to make the "sick patient" healthy through a CVA process that effectively works to "radiate" the toxicity of past administrations' sins out of the patient while the "healthy heart" is preserved and moves forward,” he said in a rather convoluted statement. “Once the CVA process has been completed and the patient is on the mend, the administrators will return Rangers Football Club plc to me for a nominal sum. The healthy heart and the healthy patient (The Rangers Football Club plc) will then be reunited through merger.
“In this scenario, the club can continue with all of its business assets, including its history, protected from the present illness. Thus a new corporate entity will own the club's assets during the incubation period including all of its history. Any suggestion that Rangers history is lost by such a process is preposterous.”
Miller would become the preferred bidder but would give up a few weeks later, citing fan opposition to his proposals and fresh information that suggested, accurately as it turned out, that the club’s financial state was more parlous than originally thought.
There were others who dipped their toes in the water before Charles Green was given the green light to proceed with his own ultimately flawed bid to save the club, among them Brian Kennedy, the Singaporean Bill Ng, and the Blue Knights group of Rangers-minded businessmen.
Of the latter consortium, Paul Murray, Douglas Park and John Bennett would belatedly make their way on to the board but too late to spare Rangers from several years of trauma and hardship. Valentines’ Day 2012 was the date that heartache truly began.
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