Last week, a quite remarkable story flared briefly for a day and then faded away.
It was a story about how BDO – the liquidators of Rangers – and Duff and Phelps traded their latest blows in the court case over how the latter failed to do all it could to get back the public’s money.
BDO believed that the club’s assets should have been sold off in a manner that enabled the public purse to see if not all then certainly a whole lot more of what was owed to it.
Much of their plan revolved around a scheme to sell Ibrox to the highest bidder.
What good would that have done, you might ask?
And would Scottish society really have stood for it?
Well, it would have done a lot of good and yes, Scottish society would not only have stood for it but I believe that much of our country would have applauded it.
Had BDO been allowed to sell Ibrox to a private equity firm, the ground could have been rented back to the club for an annual fee. The same could have applied to the training ground.
Both of these assets would have fetched a tidy sum under a deal like that.
The public would have been vastly better off, and there would still be a club playing there and paying rent on the property.
There would have been no losers here.
Even Rangers wouldn’t have lost, because a sale and leaseback which gave more money to the creditors pot might even have been enough for HMRC to consider their own claim against the club settled.
Then the liquidation itself might never have occurred.
This all casts a black shadow on the SFA, of course, and in particular the stinking, reeking document we call the Five Way Agreement.
The governing body let the sale of all the assets to Charles Green go through and they made no effort to impose conditions on him when it came time to admit them to the league.
A sale and lease back which got the public some of its money back should have been one of the conditions they imposed.
When you think about it, this is the logic of the position.
They allowed the “transfer” of trophies and titles and the name. They are the premier salesmen for the Survival Lie. It seems that the only thing they were willing to let die were the club’s enormous debts.
This was, and it remains, a travesty.
BDO should be suing our governing body for their role in this.
I’ve always believed that the SFA either helped facilitate a fraud here or turned a blind eye to it.
There is little doubt that Green was desperate to get his NewCo into the league; had the SFA demanded restitution for the victims – instead of helping to create the perception that the victims were at Ibrox – he would have had to fold and do what they wanted.
Instead the whole of this game was bent to one purpose; ensuring that club called Rangers played football in our league structure, with no questions asked and no expectations on them.
That damnable document on which it all hinges even allowed them to pick and choose what football related offences they would be charged with. It is entirely corrupt.
We forget sometimes the full scale of what went on at Ibrox.
It bears repeating that at Ibrox the same mentality is at play, the same mind-set is at work and the same arrogance is prevalent.
The more things change the more they stay the same.