The world as Rangers knew it had caved in on top of them.
With a club now headlocked in administration – being handled by the very firm Craig Whyte had in mind from the start – the spectre of something even more disastrous was fast coming into view. Liquidation.
Having spent the previous two years consumed by this constantly unfolding nightmare, Paul Murray was not about to wash his hands of it all now. No matter how hopeless it seemed.
In March 2012 Murray pulled together a consortium of wealthy fans with the aim of safely delivering their club from the clutches of Duff & Phelps. The Blue Knights were full of noble intentions and loudly championed by fellow fans.
But they were about to be dragged into a murky and increasingly bizarre power struggle. Their proposed rescue package should have been straightforward. It was certainly an easy sell to a support which was still reeling from the events of the previous few weeks.
Murray soon discovered that almost nothing was as it seemed.
“I wanted to try to pull off a CVA. It was really important because it wouldn’t have led to liquidation of the company – not the club, the company,” Murray emphasises the point with the weariness of someone who has had this particular conversation a thousand times too often.
“It would have kept Rangers in the top division albeit with a 25-point deduction. At the very worst it would have meant relegation to the Championship.
“Liquidation was a disaster we had to try to avoid at all costs.
“The two main creditors were HMRC and Ticketus. HMRC were actually quite receptive to me because they saw me as a decent guy who hadn’t been involved in any shenanigans. I was just trying my best to help find a solution.
“Ticketus also came onside because it made sense for them to do a deal, recoup some of the money they had lost and then help fund the club going forward. Together, if we had the approval of Ticketus and HMRC then we had enough support to push through a CVA.
“Brian Kennedy had a competing offer at the time. I had never spoken to Brian before but out of the blue he called me and said, ‘Look, you guys should be the preferred bidder because you are all fans of the club. I want you guys to succeed’.
“But he also said he was prepared to act as a last resort to make sure, whatever happened, the club could be saved. He didn’t want to compete against us. He wasn’t going to outbid us. He was just standing there behind us in case there were problems.”
And there were plenty. The more the goalposts shifted the more obvious it became Murray’s Blue Knights were being quite deliberately kept at arm’s length. The suspicion lingered disgraced owner Whyte was not as far removed from the decision-making process as he ought to have been.
But when Kennedy joined forces with Murray’s group and fronted up the discussions, Rangers came within a seven-hour transatlantic flight of salvation. And one final broken promise from the men in charge of Duff & Phelps.
Murray said: “For whatever reason, I had a difficult relationship with Duff & Phelps. They were hostile towards me from day one. So it made sense for me to take a step back and let Brian lead the negotiations as he didn’t have the same baggage.
“What Duff & Phelps had told me all along was that, one, HMRC were receptive to a CVA and, two, getting the shares off Craig Whyte would not be an issue. So Brian picked up the negotiations from there.
“So at the start of May, 2012, Brian called me from Manchester Airport to tell me he was on his private jet about to fly to the States on business for the week, But he said he was flying to Inverness first that afternoon to meet with Craig Whyte and do a deal to get his shares, because we couldn’t achieve a CVA without them.
“We were now getting to the final stages of completing our deal to buy Rangers. Brian then calls me again later that night before flying from Inverness to New York. He says, ‘I’ve been to see Craig Whyte. It was a pretty civil conversation. He’s agreed to hand over the shares but on one condition – that you have nothing to do with the club going forward!’.
“I told Brian I was disappointed but not in the least bit surprised. I was happy for him to proceed on that basis.
“If Brian and guys like Douglas Park were going to win control that was all that mattered to me. So I agreed to step back once the deal was done.
“Brian and I had been talking twice, three times a day all that week. Then on the Thursday evening Brian called me to say he was back on his private jet.
He had just called Duff & Phelps to say, ‘Should I ask my pilot to fly me home to Manchester or am I flying to Glasgow to do the deal with you in the morning?’
They told him to fly to Glasgow. As far as we were concerned that was it. All over. The deal was done.
“So Brian flew to Glasgow and I met him at Ibrox on the Friday morning. We were putting the finishing touches of the deal together in the boardroom.
“Then Brian’s mobile phone rings. It’s Duff & Phelps on the other end, ‘Yeah, about this deal. Just to let you know we’ve sold the club to Charles Green instead’. We just looked at one another. ‘Charles WHO? It was shattering and there was a bit of anger mixed in with the sense of shock.
“We had been involved in these discussions for months. The Blue Knights, Bill Miller, Bill Ng, Brian Kennedy – all competing to win control. But just when it seemed it was finally over – just when we had arrived to take over – some guy we had never even heard of came from nowhere to get it overnight.
“It was quite incredible – we had no inkling he was in the frame.”
And all at once Murray’s alarm bells were clattering all over again.
