Timeline to the Death of Rangers and the Emergence of Charles Green’s new club in 2012
June 2001: Christian Nerlinger joins Rangers. Little be known to the rest of Scottish football he will be the first player paid by an EBT (an Employee Benefit Trust) that will later be declared unlawful (as administered by Rangers) by HMRC and confirmed by The Supreme Court in London.
Summer 2004: Jean Alain Boumsong rejects English Premier League sides to sign for Rangers on a free transfer. Six months later he is sold (January of 2005) to Newcastle in an £8million deal. This deal is later investigated by the City of London police who raided Newcastle and Rangers in June 2007.
A later report from Lord Steven remarked:
“There remains inconsistencies in evidence provided by Graeme Souness – a former manager of the club – and Freddy Shepherd – apparently acting in an undefined role but not as a club official – as to their respective roles in transfer negotiations.”
April 2010: HMRC hit Rangers with a tax bill of £24m before penalties for non-payment of taxes on monies remitted to players and staff via the EBT scheme.
27 March 2011: A new blog appears on wordpress named ‘Rangerstaxcase.’ Little did we know the impact it will have on Scottish Football.
6 May 2011: Craig Whyte buys Rangers FC PLC for £1 from David Murray, with his holding company Wavetower taking over 85% of the Football club.
Mid-May 2011: Craig Whyte renames Wavetower to the ‘Rangers Football Group Ltd’, the holding company for Rangers FC PLC. He immediately claims he has cleared the Rangers debt to Lloyds Bank and is ready to invest in the team. He quickly removes Alastair Johnston and Paul Murray from the Board and suspends Martin Bain and Donald McIntyre.
5 June 2011: RTC uncovers a MG05 document filed at Companies House showing that Rangers have assigned 4 years of season ticket sales to another company. Craig Whyte later denies this, but later on turns out to be the mechanism by which Whyte funded the takeover.
19 June 2011: Craig Whyte is asked about the RTC blog, remarking:
“I’m aware of a website that has dedicated itself to talking about our tax case, I’ve looked at it. What they’re saying is 99 per cent crap”.
August 2011: Rangers are knocked out of Europe by Maribor. A seemingly irrelevant event, but one that leaves a £15m hole in Craig Whyte’s budget. One that he meets by not paying the taxman. RTC questions in October where this money was coming from…
10 September 2011: Court papers from Martin Bain, related to his employment case against Rangers explode across the internet.. Within them there is a plea from Bain’s lawyers to freeze the claimed compensation as they feel there is a question mark over the club’s solvency. Further it exposes the assignment of ticket sales to a 3rd party and shows that the debt owed to Lloyds Bank has not been discharged completely. RTC analysis’ of these ‘Bain papers’ is concluded with the following:
While Rangers’ supporters might not be in any mood to thank anyone for helping shed light on this situation, it is good for their club (if not its current and previous owners) that this information is in the public domain. It is especially good for our national game as a whole that we discuss the problems of the last decade openly. Rangers supporters need to ask themselves why they have meekly stood by while the future of their club has been imperiled and whether their “friends” in the media have done them an injustice by becoming complicit in the cover-up of this story.
Unfortunately, despite the information being exposed to all, the Rangers fans failed to listen…
