There’s a lot of talk at the moment about John Halsted, the American investor and current Rangers board member, based in Wyoming and currently managing partner at Pamplona Capital Management.
Worth around £1.5B, Halsted is being talked up as a potential takeover/investor at Rangers, with the club needing badly to step up financially, and the shareholder (5.42%) and now director, may be in line for doing so.
The guy is big money, and it has been suggested by some that Dave King’s play for chairman recently actually wasn’t a play for chairman at all, it was to put his name out into the public domain and invite someone to buy his shares. Someone, perhaps, called John Halsted?
Halsted has been invested in Rangers for some 3 years now, he’s definitely stayed the course and the lad has money – there are (hopeful) rumours from many fans that the long game is his takeover of the club outright, Rangers finally having that billionaire American owner.
Either that or major majority shareholder like Desmond ‘over there’, but it requires hedge funds and a lot of disparate individuals to be willing to sell their shares, and they’d only do that for either a profit or breaking even at the very least.
A lot of different groups hold Rangers shares, ‘thanks’ to 2012 and the ‘break up’ of the club’s structures the shares fell into so many different hands that now trying to hoover them all up at once and take over as a single majority or outright owner is close to impossible.
Then the next best thing is Halsted putting his hand in his pocket and just investing – well, thanks to FFP rules (more or less what Man City are on the dock for now) Rangers can’t just spend the money in the bank of an American billionaire, you must spend what you earn, and that’s where the club struggles.
So he can invest, but it has to be within the rules.
Either way, regardless of the rules, Rangers could definitely do with someone with big money behind them.
Would make a nice change.