Sevco Board Prepares For The Worst

There’s a remarkable story doing the rounds today, that Sevco has threatened to sue the members of the now disbanded Fans Board.

Why? Cause they dared to put up a Facebook page to share information with their fellow supporters.

This surely represents the low point of relations between the club and its fans, with the EGM little over a week away.

Things had already reached a point of critical mass, but this is the knife in the guts.

This is a board behaving as if it’s already out of office, one that no longer cares about negative impact or perception.

Nothing gives you a clearer sense that these people think they’re done.

They are merrily burning their bridges behind them … and that’s interesting to me.

Because it makes me wonder what else they might be doing, behind the scenes where we can’t see.

James Easdale left the board this week, and that had most of the Sevco supporters overjoyed. I don’t know why. He was one of the few people in a position of authority at the top of the Asbestos Staircase who actually has some affinity for the club.

His departure is not good news, as it leaves the Ashley faction in total control, knowing they are likely to be removed.

These people have been savaged by the media. They have been slaughtered by the fans. They came to Ibrox with no love for the club and no loyalty to it and they will leave with none.

Ashley has personally kept the lights on, although not for egalitarian reasons, and he and his cohorts looked as if they were going to run the club at break-even level.

No team in Britain needs such leadership quite as badly as this one.

The job they were trying to do is not even half done, or fully funded. The club badly needs an infusion of cash to get through to the end of the season or the choices facing King and his band of rebels will shrink to nearly zero.

I wonder how much they actually know about the state of the club.

There is no sign that they have done proper due diligence. There is no indication that they’ve been able to peer into the data room.

Even with the savage cuts overseen by Ashley and his people, this club was still posting £7 million annual losses in the last accounts.

King has made it clear that whatever else the future holds, there’ll be no cutting.

So someone, somewhere, has to put his hand in his pocket and fund this shebang. And it begs another question, one I’ve asked elsewhere;

Who exactly has funded it up until now?

Sevco is now a maze of company shells, one that doesn’t give you a clear idea of anything from asset ownership to which of the “companies” owns the player contracts.

This, as I’ve said many times, is the hellish consequence for Sevco fans in pushing the Survival Myth and especially this separation between company and football club.

One of the Sevco companies is owed £18 million by the others. That figure is on top of the annual losses, and it’s worth thinking about this for a minute.

Think of your bank overdraft. Now, imagine tomorrow morning you didn’t have one. No borrowing power. What’s in the bank at the moment is all your money, with no leeway whatsoever. Now imagine you run into trouble, with the arrival of bills you’d forgotten. What do you do?

I’ll tell you what you can’t do. You can’t simply write cheques for everything and then waltz down to the bank and tell them “My account is now in the red, but my bills are paid …”

In other words, that is not a debt that only exists on paper. It exists, and someone wrote the cheques for it and that person or group of people will need to be repaid.

Likewise, the Ashley loans.

This club’s financial affairs may well be volcanic … and I have grave doubts that King has the first clue about how bad they really are.

Now, imagine the people currently running things, and those who’ve been funding it up until now, decide that they will scorch the earth on their way out the door?

Some Sevco bloggers – most notably Bill McMurdo – are seriously concerned that King and his team don’t really have a plan.

They’ve certainly never produced one.

I’ve commented here and on Fields about how a lot of King’s projections are not really projections at all but assumptions, based on wild assertions about how much the fans will invest and how quickly the team will reach a European spot.

Those “plans” seem blithely ignorant about any number of things, including how the other clubs might screw up the timetable.

The next few weeks will probably see King’s people win the vote.

What will happen then – with the SFA and AIM having to certify this guy as well as Paul Murray – is anyone’s guess … but I’ve long suspected that it’s not going to be pretty.

We can’t know for sure what is going on inside the walls of Ibrox, but every now and again you can peer through the cracks and catch a glimpse of something that makes you go “Aaaaah … interesting.”

The one top level board member who cares about the club bailing out?

The club disbanding the Fans Board and threatening to sue those on it?

What does it mean?

Nothing good. A group of people who don’t love Sevco … preparing for the worst.

But the worst for who?

We live in interesting times.