[quote=“Bandage, post:1427, topic:1356, full:true”].
@Rocko, I see there’s another Sevco / Craig Whyte related trial ongoing at the moment.
What’s this one all about?
[/quote]
This concluded today with the great Craig Whyte being cleared of the charges against him.
Basically, he was accused of a fraudulent takeover of the Huns before they died.
The accusation was that he claimed to have money to buy the club but in fact all he was doing was selling the future season ticket sales to Ticketus and using that money to fund the purchase of the club. David Murray claimed he wouldn’t have sold the club to Whyte had he known that he didn’t have the money himself to fund the purchase.
Whyte won his case because his defence team successfully argued that even if he misled them, that it didn’t change anything because Murray was desperate to sell. Murray got back one of his metal businesses from the bank as a condition of disposing of Rangers so he had a huge personal incentive to sell. Murray had written to the board saying he had no incentive to sell but this was clearly not the case.
They’d also only had two other bids - one from a Lithuanian consortium backed by money launderers and one that turned out to be a hoax or fraud of some kind using fake names.
Basically, nobody would pay for the club with their own money so the best they could do was sell to a charlatan who was pretending to have money but didn’t. It emerged that they did no due diligence on Whyte, that Murray should really have known about the future ticket deal based on meeting notes and if he didn’t know then it was his own negligence that led to this. There were also memos from Murray’s team calling Whyte’s group “a bunch of twits with no funds” which did little to support their contention that they wouldn’t sell to Whyte if they thought him unreliable.
Also, Whyte actually did use a £1 coin to buy the club (and its debts) which he flicked over to Murray at a meeting so it’s untrue to say he wasn’t a man of personal means.
The other interesting character from the trial is Gary Withey of Duff and Phelps. He was the chief representative of Whyte during his acquisition of the club and then they worked on the administration. The BBC say that they have documents proving that he knew about the Ticketus deal during the takeover and they’re alleging that he helped get the acquisition through because he would then stand to earn huge fees for presiding over the administration and liquidation. Withey denies this but the BBC are still reporting it. Withey was also unable to give his age when asked during the trial and apparently spent a few minutes trying to answer that question because he wasn’t sure of the answer.
Finally, the icing in the cake is this delightful interview with former Rangers board member and current Sevco board member Alastair Johnston. He looks deeply hurt by what Whyte did to the huns, but now the Sevco fans are all upset with him because he basically concedes that the club died in his fragile emotional state.
