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Fans group pull the plug on Sevco

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GreenThe Rangers Fans Fighting Fund has broken off backing for the crisis club.

After months of strained relations the RFFF last night effectively issued a vote of no confidence in Mr Graham Wallace who used to work for Manchester City.

The RFFF holds almost £500,000 in trust for supporters but after being stonewalled by Mr Wallace went public in their decision to cut off relations.

A statement on their website read: “Mindful of its obligations to the Rangers Family and the money we hold in trust, the RFFF has sought information from the board of Rangers International Football Club plc to enable us to make decisions regarding the future of the RFFF and the disbursement of funds.

“We had a meeting on May 5 this year with Graham Wallace, chief executive of the club. Unfortunately, as he was not accompanied by another member of the board he felt unable to make any statement on areas of policy which we could communicate to supporters.

“Since then we have attempted to engage in dialogue but this has run its course and no further meetings have taken place or have been scheduled. With the passage of time our chairman, Andrew McCormick, wrote to Mr Wallace on Aug 28 and received a reply on Sept 2.

“Having considered the content of Mr Wallace’s reply at our most recent meeting the RFFF has decided to retain the funds donated to our safekeeping until we are satisfied that the club is financially stable.”

The RFFF was formally launched in the spring of 2012 with Walter Smith one of the trustees, Smith later became chairman of Sevco and was largely responsible for selling 36,000 season tickets to the gullible in 2013.

Hopes were high that the RFFF would provide a real lifeline for the club after the ‘SaveRangers’ campaign attracted pledges at a rate of £1m a day.

SaveRangers got widespread media attention and support with the Rangers Supporters Trust delighted by the response announcing: “SaveRangers.com has been active for 12 days and over 14,000 loyal Rangers supporters have come out in force to pledge £12,000,0000 cash required to save our club. This is after over 2000 spurious claims have been removed using a number of analytical techniques.

“The website was set up by the three main fan groups (Assembly, Association & Trust) in order to allow Rangers fans to register their intent to subscribe to a share issue, if and when the time comes, to help our club through this terrible time. It is also backed by ex players such as Gordon Smith, Terry Hurlock and more while also receiving cross party political backing from politicians in both Holyrood and Westminster.

“The response has been amazing with fans pledging what they can to help our club in the time of need and we would like to thank ALL fans who have contributed from the large contributors who have pledged 6-7 figure sums through email to the kids who have emailed in their £10 pocket money. We are all in this together and when the time comes it is good to know the commitment to Rangers future is high amongst our support.”

Sevco last week announced that their share issue had raised £3.13m but it’s doubtful whether that figure will see the club through to Halloween.

Once expenses are taken off, loans of £1.5m repaid to Mr Letham and Mr Easdale as well as the £300,000 bonus paid to Mr Wallace there could be less than £1m available to the club.

Deloitte’s have still to audit the club accounts to 30 June 2014 with a going concern warning likely to lead to a suspension in share dealing which would scupper plans for the October and December share issues.

Since announcing the September share offer on August 29 shares have tumbled from 25p to 17p with further falls expected.

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