Rangers administration: No place for Craig Whyte in club's uncertain future By ANDREW SMITH Published on Sunday 4 March 2012 01:41 IN THE next 24 hours, Rangers administrators Duff & Phelps believe they will reach some form of "consensus" with the Ibrox playing staff on the job and wage cuts required to plug the £1m shortfall per month to allow the club to continue running for the final three months of the season. And in the next few weeks, the administrators are optimistic they will have genuine expressions of interest from parties who want to buy Rangers, and create a future for the club in which they can see no place for current owner Craig Whyte. These two developments could be presented as some sort of progress. Likewise, administrator Dave Whitehouse's assertion yesterday that Rangers would avoid liquidation. Except he seemed to restrict himself to a narrow idea of the term's meaning. To followers of the Ibrox club, liquidation amounts to the end of Rangers as constituted in 1872 and a new company formed to play out of the same stadium, with the same players but not the old history. Whitehouse wasn't willing to give assurances on the avoidance of that. "Let's be clear here of definitions of liquidation," he said. If your view of liquidation is a process of cessation of the football club we are very hopeful and confident that will not happen. In terms of the way forward, we have never discounted the possibility [of a so-called "new-co" Rangers replacing the current club]. What we want to do throughout this process is minimise the effect it will have on the ability of the club to continue to operate in Europe. It is still very much our strategy to try to find a buyer for the business, which would be best achieved in terms of the ongoing financial position of the club if that [administration] could be exited through a CVA. Whitehouse as good as ruled out any possibility that the club will be able to meet the 31 March deadline for obtaining a licence to compete in Europe next year. Continental competition would be denied to a new-co Rangers for the first three years of their existence. Whitehouse admitted he "didn't know" if it would be possible for a CVA to be obtained - which requires 75 per cent of creditors to agree to accept a portion of the sums they are owed, which HMRC, as possibly major creditor, would be averse to doing - "because we don't know what interested parties are going to come up with," he said. What we have done is set a deadline of 16 March for first indicative bids from interested parties and there is a level of momentum which has been created in terms of our discussions with those parties that leads us to think we will receive bids. HMRC would form a creditor of the company, so it will determine how big the creditor pot is. It could be that the creditor pot is, and I'm guessing here, £20m, or it could be £100m, but there will be a value for creditors that will then be distributed, pro-rata, to their claims. The size of the pot would frustrate the process. To boil it down, Whitehouse expects bidders despite there being no definitives about what liabilities these bidders could be committing themselves to cover. That is why, Whitehouse explained, the redundancies that will come on Monday along with wage cuts - eight players and a 35 per cent across the board salary reduction are believed to be likely - have to serve two functions. "We are looking to achieve cost savings of £1m a month to get through to the end of the season," he said. That's to preserve the core business but, through any administration process, the ultimate objective is to secure the survival of the business. We have now got a significant level of interest in terms of potential purchasers. The vast majority have expressed a desire that they would wish to formulate their plans to make a bid for the business based on a materially reduced cost structure from that which currently exists, so that they can approach the business with a cleaner sheet of paper in terms of new investment. For that reason, the administrators had no interest in the offer of wage deferrals made by the Ibrox squad and explained: "It would have created a scenario where the purchaser would inherit a large deferred cost element and the existing intact cost base, so they'd have to invest over and above that." It has emerged that a number of players have offered to play for free. Four of these, Lee McCulloch, Sasa Papac, Kirk Broadfoot and David Healy, are among those expected to have their contracts terminated on Monday, and the gesture may not be practical with issues of insurance cover. The non-investor Rangers attracted in Whyte should become a non-person in any future dealings. There had been reports, which the administrators would not confirm, that they were to ask him to consider relinquishing his 85 per cent shareholding for no return. The administrators continue to investigate Whyte's preferred creditor status and, although he holds a security over Ibrox Park and Murray Park, there is belief that, if his security doesn't hold because he bought Rangers with the club's own season ticket money through the Ticketus deal, then the administrators could take steps to release his security over stadium and training ground.