NEITHER Craig Whyte nor Dave King would be allowed to take boardroom positions at Rangers if the club comes out of administration or is reborn as a newco after liquidation.

King's 12-year stint as a non-executive director seems certain to end even if he is part of a successful consortium which takes them out of administration. He breached the Scottish Football Association's "fit and proper person" criteria by being a member of a board which took a club into an insolvency event. Although King could argue that he played a limited role in Rangers going into administration – and that Whyte effectively excluded him from the club's governance – the SFA would almost certainly rule that any strict interpretation of their terms would mean he was complicit.

Herald Sport also understands that if Whyte was behind any takeover of a "new" Rangers, the SFA would deny it immediate access to the Scottish Premier League, effectively forcing the newco to begin life in the Third Division.

The SFA has already ruled that Whyte, the club's shamed owner, is not fit and proper to run a football club. King has asked the governing body for its position on him, too, given that he wants to be part of a consortium to take Rangers out of administration, but it would not tell him what he wants to hear.

Ironically Paul Murray, who will submit a bid next week, and former chairman Alastair Johnston would both be free to be on any future Rangers board given that Whyte had them removed as directors last May, meaning that both were gone long before the insolvency event last month. No-one can be included on a club's "official return" – which lists directors and office-bearers – if they do not meet the fit and proper person criteria, and that applies to anyone who is bankrupt or has taken another club into insolvency in the previous five years.

Rangers are hopeful that they can come to a Company Voluntary Arrangement which would enable the club to come out of administration. If that proves to be impossible, and there has to be liquidation, the newco would face major football problems. The club would be granted only associate membership of the SFA, which lasts for five years. And the new Rangers would not be able to participate in any votes during those five years (the same does not apply in the Scottish Premier League, where any new member can immediately participate in votes).

The obvious flaw with the "fit and proper" ruling is that it does not cover major shareholders, so in theory either Whyte or King could be the owner or major investor in a club, so long as they do not take a directorship. But King has also been banned from doing business in Scotland after the Crown Office granted a request from the South African tax authorities that he be prevented from dealing in or disposing of assets in Scotland because he faces charges of fraud, tax dodging, money laundering and racketeering in South Africa, which he has denied.

Stewart Regan, the SFA chief executive, defended the governing body against accusations from some Rangers fans that they should have examined Whyte more thoroughly from the outset. It was down to clubs themselves to do the first and most significant checks, he said, and in Rangers' case that should have been former owner Sir David Murray. "The alternative to that is that [the SFA] would have to employ a cast of thousands to research every potential takeover, every potential change of director, across the entire game. We don't have the resources or time to actually do that. We rely heavily on the clubs themselves.

"In the case of a plc like Rangers, you have a board of directors who are selling a club to an individual. That board of directors would undergo due diligence and, because they are a plc, would have to go through a fairly stringent process of testing out who they are selling the club to. When you [the SFA] get confirmation that the person they have sold the club to has satisfied all of these criteria, then you have to take a certain amount of credence from what those directors are saying. That is what the Scottish FA have done.

"When the individual has then told lies and hasn't disclosed the disqualification [as a company director] that he was holding, then comes back and tries to argue that wording in Article 10 [of the SFA's rules, on fit and proper conditions] is misleading and he believes it was the point of disqualification that had to be disclosed, not the fact he was still disqualified, and uses smoke and mirrors to try and buy time, then it becomes very difficult to deal with the matter quickly."

"It is my understanding that for the four years or so the club was up for sale, the talk of acting in the best interests of Rangers was top of the agenda. I think that has to be taken into account. It's easy after the event to try and find a scapegoat, to say we should have done a 'fit and proper person' test and that we should have prevented the takeover. I can't see how we could have done that, quite frankly, without having gone through a long, bureaucratic process on every single director."