I presume Johan called his son Tim for a reason 
This is all like a beautiful dream
I see the PDC crowd were loving the huns demise in Aberdeen tonight
The SFA have announced they are opening an investigation into the goings on at Rangers. The vice President of the SFA was a director on the Rangers board for many years (including during the time they had the EBTs in place) so not very hopeful of a damning verdict.
Mandaric is sniffing around Rangers apparently.
No truth to that, was just a rumour.
SPL Statement on Daniel Cousin
Press Statement: Daniel Cousin
[font=verdana]The SPL was at 3.26pm today presented with a contract between Daniel Cousin (“the Player”) and Rangers FC dated 17 February 2012, signed by the Player and by Paul Clark, the Joint Administrator of The Rangers Football Club plc (in Administration).[/font]
[font=verdana]In terms of SPL Rule A6.20, the consent of the Board of the SPL was required for the Registration of the Player with the SPL. The Board of the SPL declined to give that consent.[/font]
[font=verdana]Accordingly the Player is not Registered with the SPL and is not eligible to Play in SPL Matches. Rangers FC have the right to appeal this decision to the Judicial Panel of the Scottish FA.[/font]
[font=verdana]Notes[/font]
[font=verdana]A6.20 Except with the consent of the Board and that only where (i) the term of a Player’s contract of service with his Club has expired and such contract has not been renewed or extended or such a contract has terminated with the mutual consent in writing of the Club and the Player concerned and, in either case, the registration of such Player with the League in terms of Section D of the Rules has been cancelled and a replacement Player is sought to be registered to replace the Player whose contract has so expired or been terminated; or, (ii) where the Player sought to be registered is a temporary replacement for a goalkeeper who is unable by reason of injury or illness to play and that only where written confirmation of such inability shall have been obtained by the Club from a qualified medical practitioner and submitted to the Board and the Board is satisfied that the Club concerned has no other goalkeeper who is registered and able to play, a Club that has taken, suffered or has been subject to an Insolvency Event or Events shall not be entitled or permitted to register any Player with the League and the League shall not register such a Player in terms of Section D of the Rules until such Insolvency Event or events shall no longer continue or subsist.
[/font]
I think this means that the huns, despite being in administration, have to pay Cousin as he’s signed a contract but they can’t play him! :lol:
This part just struck me:
[font=tahoma][size=3]
The SPL was at 3.26pm today presented with a contract between Daniel Cousin (“the Player”) and Rangers FC dated 17 February 2012, signed by the Player and by Paul Clark, the Joint Administrator of The Rangers Football Club plc (in Administration).
[/size][/font]
The administrator is meant to act in the best interests of the creditors yet he signed the contract for Cousin today! How is paying out another £7.5k per week acting in the best interests of those owed millions by a busted flush of an organisation? It beggars belief that the administrator would even consider it. Of course, these are Rangers’ preferred administrators and they got in ahead of HMRC to appoint them. More dodgy stuff going on in my opinion.
Mad Vlad’s getting stuck in now. :lol:
[font=verdana]VLADIMIR ROMANOV has attacked the way Rangers has run its affairs and criticised the Scottish football authorities for failing to impose a tougher punishment.[/font]
[font=verdana]The Hearts owner, who has been a persistent and outspoken critic of what he sees as the establishment ever since he arrived in Scotland, gave his opinion as his club stand to lose around £800,000 in transfer money still owing from the Lee Wallace move to Rangers. With administration now in place, and Hearts an unsecured creditor, there is very little expectation that Hearts will see more than a small fraction of the money that is still owed to the Tynecastle club.[/font]
[font=verdana]“The bankruptcy of Rangers shows again how insolently and arrogantly operate the Scottish football mafia,” he blasted.[/font]
[font=verdana]“They stole taxpayers’ money, violating the rules of honest competition between the clubs. And for that were not even stripped of second place in the league table.[/font]
[font=verdana]“And it was all happening while they desperately wanted to push Hearts into bankruptcy through the tax authorities and the league. They plotted conspiracies in our club and tried to spread panic.[/font]
[font=verdana]“But in fact they needed all this just to distract attention from their own dubious activities.”[/font]
[font=verdana]Hearts have had a number of financial glitches to deal with themselves, ranging from late payment of players’ wages which culminated in the players’ union and the SPL becoming involved, to the shadow of the HMRC which has issued a number of winding-up orders for non-payment which have always been resolved.[/font]
The Guardian publishing the man/woman that the complicit Scottish press laughed at and ridiculed. Great article.
My blog shows how Scotland’s media were complicit in Rangers’ fall
The author of the blog that has pulled down the facade at Rangers was motivated by the failings of the Scottish press
The story of Rangers’ insolvency is already becoming a fireside tale told mostly by those who were not there, says rangerstaxcase.com.
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds” – Samuel Adams, 1775
It is easy to feel powerless in this world. “Why bother? What can I do?” Even as a student, I did not join protest marches. While most of my generation screamed: “Can’t pay! won’t pay!” about the hated poll tax, I could and I did. Raging against the machine seemed like Sisyphean futility and talk of changing the world was for poets and artists. To me, practical people just got on with it and made the best of events. Cynicism was a uniform I wore with pride. Against such a background, I make an unlikely campaigner and the last person anyone would pick to give voice to a silenced and disenfranchised community.
Yet my blog, rangerstaxcase.com, seems to have done exactly that. What started as an impulse one Sunday evening in March of last year has grown into something of a Scottish cultural phenomenon. Love it or loathe it, few would dispute that this blog has played a significant role revealing the facts and shaping the debate on a subject that has taken on such importance that the UK prime minister and Scottish first minister have belatedly jumped on the bandwagon.
This monster has grown to the point where it is now fielding daily traffic of over 100,000 views, while new arguments and ideas are fuelled by reader comments that are now coming in at a rate of about 1,500 per day. These are odd statistics for discussions characterised by accounting conventions and insolvency law. It is as if all of the cool kids in the playground suddenly want to read the swots’ algebra homework.
In a world of free information, where most blogs die alone and ignored shortly after birth, the very popularity of rangerstaxcase.com carries a message about modern Scotland. It is a story of the unmet need for the straight story, uncorrupted by the sinister Triangle of Trade that renders most of what passes as news in Scotland’s media outlets as worthless. It is the tale of why things went so wrong at Rangers and why the club’s many fans seemed paralysed by disbelief until it was too late.
If you have not spent much time in Caledonia what follows will seem a little surreal. It seems that way because it is. Scotland is a land where nothing matters like football matters – in particular within the west-central region. For over 120 years, Glasgow’s two biggest football teams have engaged in one of the world’s most bitter sporting feuds. With mindless tribalism masquerading as a religious divide, stabbings, live bombs sent through the post, and even murders have been woven into the tapestry of the recent history of Scottish football. Yet I still get challenged over my penchant for anonymity? Football in Scotland is not like football elsewhere - at least not in Europe. (Latin Americans might recognise the poison brought to the surface by the poultice of football, but few other places would understand).
Yet for all of its ugliness, I love it. A large part of my “two score and change” years on this planet has been devoted to supporting my team, Celtic. Actually watching the team would be a very small part of the time expended. The obsession with your team colours many other aspects of life for those unfortunates who find themselves pulled into the vortex that goes along with supporting either of the Glasgow giants.
Football clubs from places like Manchester and Liverpool can lay claim to much more success on the field, but these cities do not get close to Glasgow in terms of intensity of interest. It is this passion that serves as the growth medium for the bacillus that infects the news business in Scotland, which in turn serves as the carrier of the disease that threatens to kill Rangers.
Selling news of any kind in Glasgow has long been a simple business: sales are driven by stories about Rangers and Celtic. If you need a circulation boost to improve advertising rates, you need more and better stories about these football teams. Good news moves newsprint. Bad news sells, too, as fans wallow in the misery of their hated enemy. However, Scotland is not evenly divided between these clubs. Celtic and Rangers may attract similar attendances to home games, but the demographic reality is that there are a great many more people in Scotland who would claim to be Rangers supporters than Celtic. Religious census figures provide a decent proxy for the numbers that sustain both clubs: in 2001, less than 18% of the population of Scotland identified as being Roman Catholic. Celtic’s support base is far from exclusively Catholic, but it would be a little daft to ignore the reality of family religious origin in determining which football team a young boy or girl is most likely to follow in Scotland. Rangers’ demographic surplus has determined the general editorial tone of the nation’s news business for decades.
During the early 1990s when Celtic had their own brush with financial mortality, newspapers sent journalists across the globe to chase down scandal related to Celtic’s imminent demise. Such was the open glee in print, it is a wonder that the English language had to import the word Schadenfreude from German. The lowland Scots dialect would surely have had several words of its own to offer, but I doubt that the acronym GIRUY would have translated as readily across the globe. Celtic’s travails were good for the media business. There was no shortage of Rangers supporters willing to smirk at their impoverished foes while dreaming of European Cup triumphs to come. The arrival of Celtic’s saviour from Canada, the unfashionable Fergus McCann, ended the era of amateurism in the boardroom and also planted the seeds for the great divergence in the fortunes of the clubs. Few could have imagined how much could change in just two decades.
The story of Rangers’ insolvency is already becoming a fireside tale told mostly by those who were not there. Trampled down in the rush of journalists claiming that “of course, I knew all along, but I just could not say anything” are all of the derisive newspaper articles and radio call-in panellists dismissing the risks Rangers were facing. I am in no doubt: Scotland’s media, sports and business desks alike, are complicit in the disaster than has befallen Rangers. They killed their golden goose.
The Triangle of Trade to which I have referred is essentially an arrangement where Rangers FC and their owner provide each journalist who is “inside the tent” with a sufficient supply of transfer “exclusives” and player trivia to ensure that the hack does not have to work hard. Any Scottish journalist wishing to have a long career learns quickly not to bite the hands that feed. The rule that “demographics dictate editorial” applied regardless of original footballing sympathies.
The last vertex of this triangle is the reader – the average football fan. Fed a diet rich in sycophantic rubbish, he lost the ability to review critically what he was reading. Super-casino developments worth £700m complete with hover-pitches were still being touted to Rangers fans even after the first news of the tax case broke. Along with “Ronaldo To Sign For Rangers” nonsense, it is little wonder that the majority of the club’s fans were in a state of stupefaction in recent years. They were misled by those who ran their club. They were deceived by a media pack that had to know that the stories it peddled were false.
In the end, Rangers fans sat back for years and barely raised a word of complaint as their club was abused and misused. Many of these same fans who sat on their hands have had plenty to say about the motivations of my blog. Egged on by spokesmen for those doing Rangers the most harm, it is widely believed that HMRC are feeding me information to do damage to their club. Firstly, anyone reading the blog again would see that my sources of information probably lie outside of the government. Secondly, the blog has been the only dependable source of information about the sorry state of affairs within Ibrox. By revealing what has been happening at Ibrox, I have provided Rangers fans with an opportunity to do something about it. If I was really intent on harming their club, I would have said nothing at all. That this opportunity has been squandered is something for Rangers fans to contemplate. It is in helping expose this Bermuda-triangle-for-truth that I take most pride.
Rangerstaxcase.com has become a platform for some of the sharpest minds and most accomplished professionals to share information, debate, and form opinions based upon a rational interpretation of the facts rather than PR-firm fabrications. In all of the years when the mainstream media had a monopoly on opinion forming and agenda setting, the more sentient football fan had no outlet for his or her opinions. Blogs and other modern media, like Twitter, have democratised information distribution. Rangerstaxcase.com has gone far beyond its half-baked “I know a secret” origins to become a forum for citizen journalism. The power of the crowd‑sourced investigation initiated by anyone who is able to ignite the interest of others is a force that has the potential to move mountains in our society. All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard.
“Why bother? What can I do?” If it is something you care about, you can do anything you want.
Have had a small cut off Kilmarnock at 11/2 draw no bet v the insolvent huns
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Why the fuck isn’t this thread a sticky :shakefist:
Delicious irony at the top of the SPL…
Celtic
Rangers
Motherwell
Hearts
Motherwell 26 5 45 6 3 4 16 13 7 3 3 18 16
Hearts 27 5 36 8 0 5 23 13 2 6 6 8 13
Some article from Glenn Gibbons in The Scotsman comparing the huns to Nazis among other things. :lol:
[b]
Glenn Gibbons: Pride and profligacy a prelude to Rangers’ fall[/b]
By GLENN GIBBONS
Published on Saturday 18 February 2012 00:00
RANGERS’ descent into administration was no more surprising than a hurricane in the Caribbean (if potentially just as damaging), but the islanders tend to be better prepared than the great majority of those with an allegiance to Ibrox.
Considering the attention given in recent years to the financial devastation wreaked by the former owner/chairman, David Murray – this was long before the conferral of a knighthood – it seems almost perverse that the event should register as a shock, the collective wailing and lamentation disproportionate to the expectations of less partial commentators.
As with the rise of Nazism and fascism in between-the-wars Germany and Italy respectively, the most pressing question asked in retrospect has been: how could it have been allowed to happen? In the 1930s, it was concluded that entire populations were duped because Hitler built the autobahns and presided over the introduction of the Volkswagen Beetle, while Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Sixty years on, it was not difficult for any non-aligned observers to see that, in truth, Murray’s pot-hunting bluster and bravado appealed to Rangers supporters’ innate taste for triumphalism. This is a remark that will doubtless raise hackles and cause veins to pop on fevered brows, but it is a trait that becomes evident too regularly to be dismissed as insignificant.
Even the most successful managers at Ibrox have had to tolerate booing of their team for committing the capital offence of being a goal down at half-time, long before a match is completed. Underlining the hunger for success at any price (the result emphatically more important than the performance) is the peculiar phenomenon of reserving the most intense celebration for the least impressive of victories over the most moderate of opponents. Sown on such fertile ground, it is hardly surprising that the seeds of assumption and complacency should thrive.
Rangers followers’ claim to being “the greatest fans in the world” is as hollow as that made by supporters of clubs all over the planet (including Celtic). It is so much juvenile pap because, like the greatest movie ever made, the world’s greatest fans do not exist.
If anything, those who claim unswerving loyalty to Rangers have been distinguished over the decades by a tendency to thin out in the face of adversity. It is a mere two weeks since fewer than 18,000 fans (including around 1,600 visitors) attended a Scottish Cup tie, while a random glance at matches in the early 1980s, when lying third in the league, reveals crowds of 4,500 and 8,500 for successive home matches against St Mirren and Dundee.
Those hard times would undoubtedly deepen the joy of the 1990s, the support understandably too consumed by their own elation to give any credence even to the possibility that the orgiastic indulgence was unsustainable and would one day exact a toll.
When Murray made his now infamous boast of putting down a tenner for every fiver spent by Celtic, the Rangers fans were too busy gloating (a natural and forgivable reaction) to see the true significance of the bombast. It was not simply that the principle was basically unsound but that it symbolised Rangers’ suicidal readiness to pay a transfer fee that was double a player’s worth.
This peculiar – some would say insane – commercial practice was never more convincingly exposed than by the Gordan Petric business in 1995. The story is the more authentic for having been told to me by Fergus McCann, the Celtic owner/managing director at the very heart of the affair.
The late Tommy Burns, then manager at Parkhead, approached McCann and said he would like to sign Petric, the Serbian central defender, from Dundee United. Complying with the usual drill in these matters, McCann asked the manager how much he thought Petric was worth.
“Tommy told me £800,000,” the little Scots-Canadian recalled later. “So the board approved the approach. Tommy came back and told me Rangers had got wind of it and had offered £900,000. I went back to the board and got permission to up the offer to one million. Tommy came back again and said Rangers had bid £1.1 million. This continued until we went to 1.4 and Rangers once again topped it by £100,000.
“At that point, I said, ‘Tommy, enough. You are now asking me to offer £1.6 million for a player you told me was worth precisely half of that just a short while ago. No, thanks. Rangers can have him”. In the event, Petric’s generally unremarkable performances in his three years at Ibrox rather vindicated Burns’s original evaluation, but, in the context of Rangers’ present predicament, the episode becomes a beacon of enlightenment.
But no warning could have been more stark than the words uttered by the former Rangers director, Hugh Adam, and reproduced in the sports pages of The Scotsman just a few days more than ten years ago, on 2 February, 2002.
In a piece almost spookily headlined “Adam Shakes Ibrox Pillars With Warning Of Bankruptcy”, the then 76-year-old board member first revealed that he had, just before, sold the remaining 47,000 shares of his original 59,000 holding for no other reason than his conviction that, having lost two-thirds of their value in the previous three years – from £3.45 to £1.15 – they were heading towards worthlessness.
He predicted bankruptcy because “that’s the logical conclusion to a strategy that incurs serious loss year on year.” As recently as two weeks ago, Rangers-supporting posters on internet threads were still disdaining Adam as some kind of ill-informed eccentric. There is none so blind…
Rob McLean on Sportscene tonight while discussing the huns game:
[font=HelveticaNeue]“Rangers fans were once again involved in sectarian singing, mostly directed at referee Ian Brines, and here’s some reasons why.”[/font]
FFS.
Jesus.
I see tonight’s buzz words on Twitter from journalists are ‘Financial’ and ‘Assistance’. Not sure what’s to come out but plenty more apparently. Surely they haven’t been receiving payments from business men off balance sheet to pay for players’ wages and transfer fees?
The cops are putting plans in place to force a change of date to the derby in Ibrox in March if Celtic remain on course to win the title there. :rolleyes: