THE man speaking for Rangers let it be known last week that talks were at "an advanced stage" with two potential investors.
Alan Summers QC said so in court on the day former commercial director Imran Ahmad had £620,000 of the club's assets frozen. There was a lot left unsaid in Summers' throwaway remark. These investors: who were they? How much money was being discussed? Just how advanced was advanced?
On the face of it two potential investors sounded like Mike Ashley and someone else, given that by football board chairman Sandy Easdale's own admission Rangers are not exactly in advanced talks with Dave King, or in any meaningful talks with him at all.
Supporters yesterday awoke to a report that a very rich Malaysian businessman had been given the VIP treatment around Ibrox and Murray Park. Datuk Faizoull Bin Ahmad is the non-independent and non-executive director of Felda Global Ventures, a Malaysian firm which reportedly raised £3.1bn from an astonishingly successful initial public offering of shares in 2012.
Bin Ahmad has managed to get through life without leaving much of a footprint on Google but it can be assumed that he isn't struggling for disposable income. The scale of his personal wealth remains unknown. And if Rangers are to be believed, it may be of no real consequence to them.
Within a few hours of the story breaking, the club was dousing down the significance of Bin Ahmad's emergence. "Rangers this week welcomed a delegation of Malaysian businessmen led by Datuk Faizoull Bin Ahmad, chairman of the Malaysian Super League football club Felda United," said a spokesman. "The visit was organised as part of ongoing discussions between Rangers and Felda United with regard to a potential youth development partnership. It was at the request of Mr Bin Ahmad that the trip was kept confidential. While he was with us, Mr Bin Ahmad also looked at our community and social inclusion strategies. Subsequent media reports suggesting Mr Bin Ahmad is in discussions with Rangers regarding anything other than youth development are untrue."
Maybe Bin Ahmad really will turn out to be a transient, here today, gone tomorrow name in Rangers' absurd cavalcade but his introduction to the saga was revealing in one sense. There was a time when a figure like Bin Ahmad would have been embraced by supporters with a blaring fanfare of trumpets. The new saviour of Ibrox! A big hitter from the East! He has come!
Not now. These days the immediate reaction is not "just how super-wealthy is he" but "what's this guy's game?" Rangers supporters could not be blamed for the deeply jaundiced reaction afforded to Bin Ahmad yesterday, even in the hours before the club denied that he was being courted as a major investor. At best they gave the tired sigh of the battle-weary, at worst renewed expressions of anger that their club seemed to be getting hawked around again.
A chorus line of pillagers has blown in and out of Ibrox since 2011 and it will be a long time before any unknown figure is met with anything other than the deepest suspicion. To many Rangers supporters Bin Ahmad's character was immediately, irrevocably stained by the revelation that the middle-man in his discussions with the club was convicted fraudster Rafat Rizvi, who is free to go about his business in the United Kingdom but is wanted by Interpol of all people.
Interpol wants a word about "corruption, money laundering and banking crime" given his alleged role in the collapse of an Indonesian bank. Rizvi denies wrongdoing but in his absence he was sentenced to a 15-year jail sentence in Indonesia.
"Mr Rafat Rizvi arrived with the Malaysian delegation without our prior knowledge. He is an advisor to Mr Bin Ahmad," Rangers' spokesman went on. Rizvi has long been a toxic name in the Rangers story having had previous business links with Charles Green and Imran Ahmad. In an interview with STV last December Sandy Easdale was asked about Rizvi and said categorically that he had never had any contact with him. A few months later, on Monday, the pair of them looked happy enough in each other's company over lunch in a central Glasgow restaurant.
On the face of it, giving Bin Ahmad the full works around Ibrox and Murray Park, after he had stayed overnight with two associates in the luxurious Mar Hall Hotel in Renfrewshire, seemed like quite a lot of effort to make for the sake of a youth development partnership and to show off Rangers' community and social inclusion strategies.
In fact, in less suspicious times, that might seem like exactly how Rangers should behave. It is how professional, efficient clubs operate together when discussing exactly those sort of issues.
But any meeting between Easdale, Rizvi and a very wealthy Malaysian will not be easily taken at face value any time soon, given the climate of distrust around Ibrox and the fact the club is on its knees behind a begging bowl. Presumably Rangers' "advanced" talks with two potential investors continue.
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