Ticketus say 'no future involvement' after Green's Rangers bid accepted

Rangers: Ticketus agreed a deal for Ibrox season tickets last year.SWNS

Ticketus has confirmed it has "no future involvement" in Rangers as administrators accepted an offer from consortium headed by Charles Green.

The London firm said it now expects to become a creditor in the company voluntary agreement (CVA) Mr Green said his group are striving to achieve.

This comes days after Ticketus formally launched legal action against Rangers owner Craig Whyte over the £27m in personal guarantees he gave the branch of Octopus Investments as part of the season ticket deal.

The ticketing agency, which bought the licence to sell around 100,000 Ibrox season tickets until 2015 for £25.3m last May according to guidance given by the Court of Session earlier this year, also confirmed it had held talks with Mr Green recently but no agreement was reached between them.

On Sunday, Mr Green’s consortium had its £8.5m offer for the crisis-hit club accepted by Duff and Phelps, whose previous choice of preferred bidder, American Bill Miller, collapsed days after it received the status.

A Ticketus spokesman said: "Around the time of Mr Miller’s preferred bidder status we spoke to Mr Green, neither party reached any agreement and he went ahead with his bid.

"Ticketus is now a creditor in a CVA and it is not involved in the future of the club in any way."

Joint administrator David Whitehouse said Mr Green's group hopes to put forward a CVA proposal by Monday, May 21, before a meeting of the creditors takes place and a vote is held on the offer on June 6. Should the CVA be agreed then, there is a 28 day "cooling-off period" during which time creditors can raise objections or challenges to it.

Administrators Duff and Phelps previously took Ticketus to the Court of Session for guidance over the contract it had agreed with Mr Whyte. Lord Hodge ruled the insolvency firm could breach the deal if it was in the interests of the club’s creditors overall, as the agreement drafted in English law did not give the firm the same rights to the season tickets in Scots law.

In a report released in April, Rangers’ administrators estimated that Ticketus would be owed around £26.7m if it became a creditor, while it had already received around £8m in payment for the deal.

Ticketus’ agreement with Mr Whyte came after it struck a similar deal for Ibrox season ticket sales in 2009 when Sir David Murray owned the club.

The company is pursuing Mr Whyte through Scottish courts in relation to his guarantees over the deal, which he had previously stated he was "on the line" for. Mr Whyte used the money from the agreement to wipe off the club’s £18m debt to Lloyds Banking Group in May 2011.

In a report by the Scottish FA’s judicial panel over Rangers’ and Mr Whyte’s breaches of several rules, the views of the club’s financial controller Ken Olverman were reported in relation to the Ticketus deal. He claimed to have had "no knowledge" of the deal and was only alerted to it when HM Revenue and Customs officials contacted him in relation to offset VAT invoices found with the London firm raised by Rangers FC.

The panel reported that Mr Olverman, who did not confront Mr Whyte or any other Rangers directors in relation to the invoices, had not seen any money from Ticketus arrive in the club’s accounts. In September last year he eventually saw the invoices in question that he felt had been created using "Clip Art" on Microsoft Word.

Mr Whyte’s Rangers FC Group and his lawyer Gary Withey’s former firm Collyer Bristow are being sued for more than £25m by the club’s administrators over what they allege was a "conspiracy" in the take over of the 140-year-old club. This case will be argued at a further hearing at the High Court in London in October.

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