A Story about Craig Whyte, Rangers, Charlotte, and the Last 2 Years – Guest Post by Goldstein

I don’t have any quotes, or smoking guns, or links to official documents, tape recordings, or any credentials whatsoever. All I have is a story, a story that you will hopefully agree has a ring to it. In a way, everything that has happened over the last 24 months is evidence. You are all familiar with the facts, so hopefully my story will help you process them.

Let me start by suggesting this story makes much more sense if you look at it from the perspective of Craig Whyte, before, during, and after RFC went into administration. Very little of that which follows is in the least bit controversial. Most of the key events and facts are already known and in the public domain. How those facts and events are explained here in my story might be a surprise to some but I think deep down inside everyone who reads it will appreciate its simplicity and wonder how they didn’t see through all this before.

1) Craig Whyte took over at Rangers with the intention of doing what he does best; taking the business into administration, keeping the assets under his control, ridding the company of debt and potential liabilities. The BBC documentary exposed Whyte as an expert with a lot of history in doing this; the word switcheroo entered common parlance.

2) As planned, Rangers went into administration in Feb 2012. Craig Whyte got to choose the administrators; D&P were people he had had intimate dealings with in the past, indeed key personnel at D&P had helped him buy RFC in the first place and secure Ticketus loans.

3) The assumption at this stage was that RFC would come out of administration, one way or another, debt free. But there was a problem. Craig Whyte was demonised in the newspapers, it wasn’t going to be easy treating this like any other switcheroo, not with all the attention on this, everyone watching the magician’s hands, he had to deviate from the usual switcheroo blueprint.

4) Charles Green was brought in ostensibly as a leader of a consortium that had no connections with Craig Whyte whatsoever. His real role, however, was to secretly represent Craig Whyte, hide the switcheroo, with Whyte in the background until his reputation was recovered. On paper this was a good plan; the chosen one (Green) would do what needed to be done, D&P knew the script, they’d come out the other side just in time for the new season. But problems appeared again, and time was ticking away. RFC was also perilously close to running out of cash.

5) The big problem with Green was that he was obviously just a front man. Even John brown worked that out. Rangers’ fans generally in the beginning assumed he was representing Whyte – he was. This isn’t even disputed now by Green. So how do we fix that problem, from Whyte’s perspective, with time ticking away and money running out?

6) Easy: put on a Punch and Judy type fight with Green & Whyte. Project the idea that Craig Whyte isn’t happy, he is at war with Charles Green who has popped up from nowhere and stolen the assets. If you believe they are genuinely fighting each other over the ownership of Sevco and the assets, by implication you believe that Whyte has no involvement in the New Co and that they are not in cahoots. That means the fans can trust Green and buy season tickets. They believed it. It worked. They bought season tickets.

7) The plan solved a few other problems. It gave the clear impression that Whyte wasn’t involved and that was important in the eyes of the SFA. There was a general sense that it would be best in a lot of respects if Whyte wasn’t involved (HMRC, the Law, The Media).

8) Charlotte Fakes was invented for the specific purpose of giving people the impression that Green and Whyte were at odds with one another, that Whyte had been robbed and had no role in the new co. It’s pure theatre. Everybody who matters knows this – it’s the big secret at the heart of the debate. That’s why nobody will publish a thing Charlotte comes up with. It’s also why people like Alex Thomson have disappeared.

9) Key to this whole story is the issue of Whyte’s security on Ibrox; it was water-tight, designed and expected to survive any liquidation event. It would have been impossible for Green to do what he appeared to be doing without Whyte’s consent and cooperation whilst that security was in place. He didn’t need to. The real story is that he has been working with and for Whyte all along.

10) The ultimate goal for Whyte was to cleanse the company of debt and float it on the stock-market. That’s what they succeeded in doing. Even if he walked away now he would be walking away several millions pounds better off. He’s there in the background now with a pile of shares – he can’t and won’t lose. The whole Sevco 5088 court case story is a smoke screen and nothing will come of it.

Whyte and his gang basically drove up and took over a company that had around £40 to 50 million of assets for nothing. The problem was the company also had liabilities and debts of up to £150 million. Whyte had done this before, liquidate and come out the other side with the good stuff, leaving the bad stuff behind. In essence this was the simple plan.

With liquidation he had to make sure his front man bought the assets, at a huge discount, it has to be said – that’s where the profit lies, in selling £50 million of assets to yourself for a fraction of their true value. D&P were key, of course. Politics and public or fan opinion got in the way. This wasn’t some unheard of textiles company in Wolverhampton – attention and interest levels were sky high. So he had to add a few illusions to the usual switcheroo formula.

After liquidation the plan would always have been to sell the newly constituted company on the stock market. That process in essence is how you turn the assets into cash. Once they sell the shares they are away with it, and it looks like they probably have sold most of the shares already.

If you process everything through the filter set out above, hopefully things might make more sense. Any time you find it hard to explain any aspect of the process, just come back to this simple story and look at things from the perspective of Craig Whyte. Most people so far have contested the story on the basis of things Charlotte Fakes has released. What they, we, and everybody need to bear in mind is that this was the very purpose of Charlotte Fakes – to hide the true nature of the process and give the impression that Whyte and Green could not possibly be acting together. It has been very effective for them; we all got caught up in the drama of it, gloating over the latest revelations, etc. We all fell for it. It was very clever.

Posted by Goldstein

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