A Campaign Of Destabilisation Against Sevco Ends In … Success?
Nothing is more representative of King and his mentality than the way he went about climbing onto the Sevco board of directors. It was unbelievable and the SFA were watching it the whole way in, and still decided he was a fit and proper person.
Almost as shameful was the media and how they covered this guy and what he was involved in.
A lot of people have made moves to take over football clubs in Scotland over the years. King and his board could have done what they did in any number of ways, including going to the shareholders they wanted to buy from and offering fair value for the shares.
Not Dave King. Instead, he launched a highly suspect campaign of destabilisation against the board.
He urged boycotts of games. He bought a blackmail box from a hacker.
He started leaking compromising information to various websites and blogs.
He undermined the Ibrox board at every opportunity.
He drove down the share price.
He shattered the link between the directors of the club and the support.
He used the media to wage constant war against them.
The press wants us to forget all about that, all about their role in this. Not a chance. They helped this guy get his claws in the club and that will be remembered as long as we, the bloggers, are out here doing what we do.
King assembled his team, some of them businessmen who understood that they were on the ragged edge of legitimacy. One of them sent an email to King expressly spelling out the risks of trying to deny they were acting in concert, and urging him to buy a number of shares that would keep them under the 30% threshold in case it all unravelled.
King ignored that advice and ploughed on doing it his way. Having lowered the share price and turned fans against each other, having used information obtained illegally and putting together a secret concert party he knowingly pushed across the 30% threshold.
And so the King era at Ibrox began, in scandal.