Dave King has ignored the Takeover Panel’s instructions to submit an offer for the remaining shares in Sevco.
The deadline has expired and he is now in breach of the regulators rules.
Earlier this month he resigned from the board of South African company MicroMega, in anticipation of this moment. He remains, however, on the Sevco “main board” as chairman, tainting them with the inevitable consequences of his failure to toe the line.
We speculated that King might not be able to make the offer.
One of the key problems was that he was being asked to provide “proof of funds” for the shares.
That he couldn’t produce the reputed £11 million that was required should shatter, once and for all, the illusion that he is able to fund Sevco to the extent he has promised.
It confirms the work some of the bloggers, myself included, did when he took over the club two years ago and assessed his net worth as being far less than the media had been led to believe.
In addition, there are significant obstacles in his way in relation to South African exchange controls, as well as the terms of his “deal” with their revenue service. This is a convicted crook; I know the Scottish media would rather we didn’t discuss that, or the appalling reputational damage his presence on the board has already done to the club, but the facts don’t change simply because our friends in the media do not want to report them.
Sevco fans who placed their faith in this guy, and who expected moonbeams … well this is the day all your chickens came home to roost.
King is a busted flush.
He has been exposed as a charlatan, a liar and a fantasist.
Anyone who still believes that he can take the club forward is a mug.
I cannot put it more bluntly than that. Dave King is finished. Even if he were not an out and out liar, he does not have the resources to take the club forward; that is now without question. It’s as some of us have been saying all along; the SARS deal cleaned him out.
King will brass-neck this as long as he can, but when the Takeover Panel applies the “cold shoulder” the SFA is going to have to ban him from the Ibrox boardroom, and they will have to monitor the situation to make sure he is no longer running things from Johannesburg.
King loves the media attention so much that will be a matter of time before he gives an interview to somebody assuring them he’s still in charge. This has all the hallmarks of a farce already; the governing bodies, like the Sevco fans, cannot say they weren’t warned this would happen.
And the consequences of that haven’t even been considered yet.
If King is gone the whole financial underpinning behind the Sevco “business plan” is erased at a stroke. All their financial projections – including those which they have submitted as part of their European license requirements – will need to be re-drawn.
I cannot overstate how damaging all this is to them, whether he’s on the board or not.
The undisputed fact is that King has ignored the Takeover Panel requirement and that will have consequences. There is no avoiding them.
As he sits on the Ibrox throne those consequences will fall on the club.
For everyone who cheered him through the door, whether in the media or in the stands, or from the boardroom you currently share with him, this is what you have wrought, so congratulations. Never before has the old American aphorism been more apt, or more ominous;
“You broke it. You own it.”