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BDO make £56.8m claim on Ibrox administrators over their cut price Charles Green deal

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BDO have made a £56.8m claim against Duff and Phelps after creditors were left high and dry by the Ibrox sale of assets in 2012.

Ibrox Stadium and Murray Park should have secured a worthwhile deal for the 276 creditors left with invoices when the club went into liquidation in June 2012 with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs the biggest losers alongside newsagents, florists, taxi firms and a face-painter.

Those two land assets had been valued at £130m during the height of Dave Murray’s reign but a more realistic value of £25m has been placed on them by Duff and Phelps.

Selling them would have given something back to the creditors with a property firm likely to buy and lease back to the Tribute Act set up by Charles Green. Annual rent of £5m would have been realistic for the historic old lady and the state-of-the-art facilities at Murray Park.

Instead, the land assets were sold to Green for a knockdown £5.5m, he valued them at £80m in a prospectus with £20m raised in a share issue in December 2012 while the creditors looked on from the outside.

Covering a report in The Herald, The Sun reports:

The liquidators say the action is being taken because of questions over the strategy used by Mr Clark and Mr Whitehouse in the administration process after Rangers plc went into financial meltdown in February, 2012.

The club’s collapse hit thousands of unsecured creditors out of pocket, including fans with debenture seats at Ibrox, a framer from a Bearsden and the owner of a face-painting business.

A source close to the former administrators, quoted in The Herald, said that liquidators are arguing they should have had a fire sale of assets such as high profile players, and property such as Ibrox and the club’s Murray Park training ground.

BDO are believed to have Ibrox valued on the open market at £25m, before Charles Green’s Sevco 5088 Ltd ended up buying the assets of the club for £5.5m in June 2012 when Rangers went into liquidation.

Virtually no money could have been raised from player sales with loyal stars like Allan McGregor, Steven Naismith, Kyle Lafferty and Steven Whittaker leaving as free agents to walk into lucrative contracts elsewhere. Southampton paid £800,000 to the Tribute Act for Steve Davis.

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