King is told to cough up £11m
RANGERS chairman Dave King has been ordered to offer £11million to buy out the club’s shareholders – despite claiming to be “penniless”.
The Gers chief now needs to make funds available to offer all other investors in the club 20p per share.
The crushing defeat came after judge Lord Bannatyne ruled that takeover watchdogs had proved King is in control of his own millions.
The entrepreneur had insisted at the Court of Session that his family and an offshore firm held the purse strings – and called the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers’ claim a “non-issue”.
The panel went to court after King claimed in March that 20p a share did not represent a fair price and refused to make the share offer, a legal requirement under the 2006 Companies Act.
Rangers International Football Club shares were trading yesterday at 34p a share – meaning it would be extraordinary if any shareholder would accept a 20p offer in any case.
In court, an email from George Letham – one of the “three bears” in partnership with King – was used to prove they were well aware of the requirement to make an offer to buy the remaining shares in the club after taking a holding of more than 30 per cent.
The email referred to plans to buy out blocks of shares in the club.
Letham wrote: “Dave, just a reminder that after we buy Lacey today, we will hold 19.7 per cent.
“We really only want to buy Artemis 10 per cent if it (sic) the intention to stay under 30 per cent otherwise we will have to make a mandatory offer.” The Takeover Panel’s advocate James McNeill QC told the court that this showed King was aware that he would have to make an offer for the remaining shares. The chairman used offshore trusts in the name of his family to buy 34 per cent of Rangers’ shares in 2014. But he claimed a company registered in the British Virgin Islands had control over some of the shares and that he had no authority on how the money could be spent. His lawyers also argued he didn’t have the money to make the £11million offer, claiming he was “penniless”. In proceedings which were heard in October this year, the court was told how financial investigators had concluded that King was in control of the shares in the club. McNeill told Lord Bannatyne that on December 31, 2014, the “three bears” purchased 16.23 per cent of shares in Rangers. The lawyer told the court King then contacted financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and instructed that 14.73 per cent of the shares in Rangers be purchased. The money came from King’s family trust and the shares were held by a company called New Oasis Management Ltd, who are registered in the British