International businessman Dave King has claimed that he was duped by Dave Murray!
For 12 years the South African based tax evader was a non-executive director at Ibrox with one of his key roles being to scrutinise the club accounts to ensure that the interests of shareholders prevailed.
In June 2012, 13 months after the club was sold by Murray to Craig Whyte for £1 with Mr King sitting in the blue room of dignity, liquidation of the club began leaving shareholders and debenture holders clutching worthless certificates.
Three years later BDO have still to produce a final report on how Her Majesty’s Revenue and Custom were denied £21m while hundreds of others from public bodies to face-painters, florists, taxi drivers and newsagents were left out of pocket by a footballing dream that failed spectacularly.
Mr King invested £20m with his friend Mr Murray in 1999 to become the second club from Glasgow to win the big cup- in 2006 Rangers (IL) reached the last 16 of the competition. Various reports in South Africa claim that Mr King got over £18m of his money back from the club.
Speaking to the Sunday newspapers the newly installed Ibrox chairman claimed: “David Murray never ever let me know that the money that ‘we’ were putting in was my money and not his money.
“He should have let me know. I never knew at any stage that if something happened to the Murray Group it could come back to Rangers. I regard myself as having lost a substantial portion of money because of non-disclosure.
“It wasn’t a management issue and it wasn’t just about losing the money. I’ve resigned myself to not getting the money back. I really felt there was a level of disclosure.
“I was David’s senior partner in the funding and he would come to me from time to time. He owed me the obligation to say ‘by the way Dave, I’m asking you to put your money in but this [Murray’s contribution] is not really my money’.
“I believed that we were both putting in surplus cash that we could afford to lose. The fact he couldn’t afford to lose it cost me losses that I believe were unnecessary. That’s what I was sore about.”
Having gone public claiming that he couldn’t keep tabs on his own personal investment Mr King is hoping that other ‘investors’ will come forward to fill the £10m/year funding shortfall now that the club has no friendly overdraft facility from the Bank of Scotland and has to pay HMRC in the same way as every club in Scotland.
Showing his dubious grasp of economics the man once dubbed a glib and shameless liar by a South African judge claimed in midweek: “Now if you look at Rangers, even in terms of the financials, we are in an incredibly strong position. We have shareholders who can fund it and it has virtually no debt. How many clubs in the world don’t have debt?
“For any football club our balance sheet is incredibly strong. We are one of the strongest clubs in the world financially.
“How many clubs are sitting with £5m of interest-free debt (the loan that Mike Ashley has recalled) and that is all they’ve got? We got the fans, we’ve got the season-ticket money, we’ve got the stadium, everything all paid for. There’s not many clubs in that position. We’re incredibly strong financially at the moment.”
With loans of £5m from Ashley, £3m from the ‘three bears’, £1.5m from King and a share issue that raised £3m in September Sevco will face Motherwell in a play-off for a place in next season’s Premiership.
