Dave King is in the final lap of his tenure as Sevco chairman.
I wrote yesterday about how he might hang on in there a while longer, but this week is the beginning of the end. King is done for. The slide into the abyss might be fast or slow but it’s begun and there is nothing he can do to pull himself back from it. He’s too late for that by a long way.
The longer he goes on, the worse this gets for the club. After a certain point – and it won’t be far away – the dirt on him gets on them too. The other directors must be petrified of being tainted, but so far they’ve failed to take the action that will save them from it.
It’s almost as if the whole club has entered into a suicide pact with this guy; it’s like they’ve decided they’ll all go down together. I cannot imagine how they think this will end; it won’t be well. It won’t be in any way that benefits the club, or them.
These people should never have thrown in their lot with this guy in the first place. I’m going to take a look here at some of the things King has done since taking over that should have raised eyebrows. Not all of them are related to his lying either … this guy has so many of the hallmarks of a sociopathic personality that they should be scared to death.
He is willing to drag them all down with him, and the club too. King is a go-for-broke kind of guy, and that’s all well and good if he knows what he’s doing and has a track record for winning these things but if this guy was a poker player his shabby bluffing would have had him blown out after less than a dozen hands.
He is bad at this stuff.
This week, he goes all-in and that means Sevco does too.
A Little Bit Of Background: There Was A Crooked Man …
Dave King was in legal trouble a long time. The South African tax man accused him of running a number of pump and dump scams and then hiding the proceeds in offshore trusts called Ben Nevis and Glencoe. As is so typical with this eejit it was his ego that got him caught; King gave an interview to a newspaper over there where he boasted of how he had purchased an expensive painting at an auction and a minor tax inspector read it.
The rest is history. Of the worst kind.
King eventually pled guilty to income tax evasion and a slew of minor charges. He could have gone to jail for over 80 years. He paid monumental fines which all but wiped him out. What’s not so commonly known because the media never reports is that another part of his deal involved the South African government dropping even more serious charges against him including fraud, forgery and bribery. The scale of what he did over there is hard to quantify.
He was not only reckless but arrogant.
He went head to head with the government believing he could win by spending more than they could afford to. But his pig-headedness made him public enemy number one over there and with every egotistical pronouncement they grew more determined to bring him to heel.
He courted further trouble at every step.
The man is a born criminal, but he’s also a born gambler.
Sadly, for Sevco he’s not a particularly good one. The evidence against him was overwhelming. With the certainty of jail looming he cut and run … because that’s what he does. Right to the edge, but no further. A gambler yes, but ultimately gutless.
No sooner had he been cleared but he was off and running with a brand new scam … and that’s the one that brought him to Scotland again.
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.
King Reached Out To The Lunatics Who’ve Been With Him Ever Since.
One of the first things King did when he walked through the doors of Ibrox was pander to the lunatic fringe. He met up with the craziest sections of their support and whatever assurances he gave them, he’s at least tried his best to keep the faith with them.
His meetings with those guys gave him power over a section of the fan-base.
He had the attack dogs on his side.
It’s no surprise that their websites have been the most solidly behind him all the way, and that they are major supporters of his phony fan organisation Club 1872. He speaks their language. And sometimes so does the club.
It was this pandering to the extreme element that led, directly, to some of the most breathtakingly searing press releases that have ever been put out by a Scottish club. They included attacks on Celtic and a scandalous one in the aftermath of the Scottish Cup Final.
The club is in the grip of some bad people and King has been their icon from the first.
No wonder he thinks he can brazen this crisis out.
Lies, Lies, Lies … And One Little Bit Of Truth.
King has lied constantly.
That’s probably not a surprise to a living soul except for those in Scottish sports newsrooms who somehow were under the impression that King was a model of probity. I’m not going to bore with a list of his lies – everything from how much he was investing to what actually happened to the Sports Direct deal, save to say this.
He has lied to everybody. He has told so many lies you wonder if a single statement of his has in any way been true.
Except one. I’ll come to that in a minute.
He has lied to the media. He has lied to the club’s commercial partners. He has lied to the courts. He has lied to his managers. He has lied to his fellow directors and he has lied, above all, to the fans, time and time and time and time again.
People believed that this guy would put money into the club.
The blogs had explored his financial position and we concluded that he couldn’t have invested big money even if he had it, even if he had wanted to.
Too many obstacles were in the way, including South African exchange controls. But even as he was promising that he would do something that was plainly impossible he also gave the Sevco fans the hard truth, and the media has never mentioned it since.
He told them straight that they would end up funding every one of his grand schemes.
He told them that Rangers fans had traditionally outspent Celtic fans – which, by the way, turned out to be another one of his lies – and said the only way the club would reach the top was for the Sevco fans to do the same. He couldn’t have made it more clear.
Club 1872 is only one of the vehicles by which he intends to squeeze money out of the supporters.
If he lasts beyond this week, watch season ticket prices soar amongst other things.
Dave King Likes To Pick Fights. Whether He Can Win Them Or Not.
King loves a good battle.
That alone should have had everyone else at the club running for the hills.
The only people he hasn’t gone head to head with are the SFA: it makes you wonder what games he’s played with them behind the scenes and how much they’ve bent over for him in the last two years. He’s fought with everyone else.
The fight he picked with Ashley was bad enough, but that he dragged his sponsors and kit manufacturers into it was outrageous. To tell them that the issue was nothing to do with them was frankly ludicrous and dangerous. The Ashley battle was inevitable, as King has used him as the boogeyman during his campaign against the board.
But a smarter man would have got in the door and tried to make peace; instead, his belligerent attitude only made the divide between them worse, and soon enough it was a yawning chasm which King couldn’t have bridged if he wanted to.
Picking a fight with a bona-fide billionaire, a guy with unlimited funds … how stupid can you get?
Stupider, anyway, in the case of the Takeover Panel battle.
There was just no need for King to poke those people with a stick the way he did, refusing to co-operate, trying his stalling tactics, failing to disclose information in a timely fashion … it was almost as if he was desperate for them to take action. It ended up in court, as we know, with King defying them as well.
Who knows whether he’ll provoke them further? But there is no sign on the horizon of the share offer he is supposed to be making. If the clock started ticking the day of the court case then he’s got mere weeks left and something like that takes time to set up.
I do not know what he hopes to gain. As with Ashely this is a fight he can’t win … the same applied in South Africa but he was able to negotiate at the very end with both of them. But here he’s arguing with a judge who will hold him in contempt and the City of London regulators who are already well and truly sick and tired of his games.
Decisions Made. Decisions Delayed. Decisions Passed On To Someone Else.
King tries to look decisive at times.
At other times he seems almost chronically scared to be on the scene of big decisions.
He famously did not meet either Warburton or Caixinha.
He was providing himself with alibis in case those decisions went wrong … which they did.
The way that club runs under him is farcical. It is a shambles.
He was supposed to be taking charge of the hunt for the manager after Caixinha was binned. How did that go again? He presides over a board which has talked about turning debt into equity but he has yet to do it. He delays decisions he doesn’t like. He passes on those he thinks he can get away with. His sets foot in Scotland once in a blue moon.
He is the ultimate absentee landlord. Would the club even miss him if he was gone? It is difficult to see what positive he brings to it. It’s not an exaggeration when I say that I don’t particularly want him to leave Ibrox, that I want to see this guy there for years.
I see no sign that Dave King knows how to take the club forward. In fact, his position there places them in jeopardy. This might well be his final week on the job, but few chairman of a Scottish club has ever made so many headlines and all for the wrong reasons.
Yet the media loves him. He never gets the scrutiny Fergus got, and whilst people are all too happy to crawl around in files whenever there’s a hint that Dermott Desmond’s name is tied to a scandal, however peripherally, King escapes such attention.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of his many sins at Sevco; that would take far longer to write. Instead this is a brief overview of them … and it’s not at all brief.
This is who he is; a brazen liar, a guy who comes over at times like a high-wire gambler but who’s yellow from backbone to belly button, who frequently bites off more than he can chew because he underestimates his opponents and overestimates his own ability to deal with what they throw at him. This is Dave King. This is Mr Fit and Proper.
Within the next week he will either have submitted accounts to the SFA or he will not.
He will have complied with a court order or he will not.
If he chooses to play another game of brinksmanship it will be his last.
He doesn’t have the wherewithal to make the share offer and he is ever wary of what the scrutiny which goes with doing so will reveal.
But he has courted all of this. All the trouble, he’s brought on himself, because it’s who he is.
Whether it’s this week or not, the countdown clock has started.
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