The Death of Rangers: Basket of Assets – Did Charles Green Purchase Those Titles as he Claimed?

Listed below are the assets of Rangers FC Plc bought by Charles Green (from Duff & Phelps) after the proposed CVA was rejected by creditors at Ibrox in June 2012....

Assets Price
Goodwill £1
SPL Share £1
SFA Membership £1
Leasehold Interests £1
Player Contracts & Registrations £2,749,990
Stock £1
Plant & Machinery £1,250,000

Contrary to what Green claimed, nowhere is Rangers FC listed as an asset. Nowhere is the history of Rangers FC listed as an asset. Yet, a thesis has been postulated that a company’s history can be sold as a separate item in a company asset sale. This is manifestly absurd. In the case of Rangers, the bizarre logic of that position is:

a) Craig Whyte had the option not to purchase the history of Rangers when the club was sold to him, or parts of the history that he did not like, thus wiping out any potential tax liability or creditor debt.

b) After Craig Whyte, someone could have purchased the stadium while another party could have submitted a successful bid to own its history.

c) If a club’s history was a saleable asset then it would also mean that a club, even as a going concern, could sell off its history to another club in an effort to raise money.

Quotes from Edinburgh based QC – Alan Dewar

All of this, of course, is unheard of, and for good reason: a club’s historical events are tied irrevocably to that club and a club separated from its history loses its identity and meaning. Crucially, when insolvency law kicked in and consigned Rangers FC Plc and its football activities to the past, the club and its history thereafter ceased to continue, except as an historical footnote.

There has been an attempt to conflate a company’s goodwill with ownership of its historical timeline. HMRC define goodwill as “the value of the attraction to the customers which the name and reputation possesses”. The value of purchasing Ibrox stadium and playing in the same colours as the old club, given the record of achievement of the old Rangers FC, was obvious to Charles Green, but equating goodwill to ownership of Rangers FC and its historical timeline is an incredulous sleight of hand that flies against both the common sense definition of goodwill and the concrete clarity of insolvency law.