It would be an unlikely scenario that the new shareholders and investors in Rangers did not know the existing terms in place on loan players from Newcastle before they invested in the club. The Glasgow side revealed they must pay Newcastle £500,000 if they are promoted from the Scottish Championship this year after they were loaned players from the St James’ Park side at the start of the year. Of those players, only Haris Vuckic has contributed to Rangers’ campaign, scoring five goals in seven appearances. The news came as Rangers published a disappointing set of financial figures for the second half of 2014 to the Stock Exchange early on Tuesday morning. The club reported losses of £2.6m 'before finance costs' for the six months to December 31, compared with a loss of £3.53m for the corresponding period in 2013. The Dave King-led consortium ousted the previous board earlier this month, with the new directors at Ibrox agreeing loans totalling £1.5m from the Three Bears shareholders George Letham, George Taylor and Douglas Park, who is also on the board.
Football financial expert David Bick said: "The first thing you’ve got to say is Mike Ashley lent some money when they could have gone out of business but what I find very sad about this when you look at the numbers is that for the first six months the turnover was £13m. When you compare that to some of the numbers we see in England, it’s quite a sad number; the balance sheets pretty much only held up by the property that they own and the loans that were put in by Mike Ashley and more recently money that has been put in by the newer shareholders. So I think those shareholders, when they put that money in, would’ve known what the deal was with Newcastle, or with Mike Ashley. I don’t think there can really be any complaints about that. The bigger issue for Rangers now is to recover from here."
Rangers are currently operating without a Nominated Advisor (nomad), which is required for a company listed on the AIM part of the Stock Exchange and would lose their listing without one after a certain period of time. Bick said he expected interim chairman Paul Murray and the rest of the new board members to find a new nomad before the deadline of Saturday, 4 April, with business needing to be concluded before the Easter weekend, on either Thursday or Friday. He went on: "Rangers are on that part of the Stock Exchange called the AIM market, which originally stood for Alternative Investment Market. It’s, if you like, the market for the smaller company. One of the rules of that is they have to have a financial advisor. It’s shortened to Nomad but it means nominated advisor, but effectively a financial advisor. Every Stock Exchange company has to have one and in the case of the AIM market if they haven’t got one in place after a certain period of time then they will lose that listing on the stock exchange. I would have thought that now the new shareholders have got control of the club I’d be surprised if they didn’t get that in place in time."