Rangers administrator Paul Clark has suggested there has been takeover interest from America and the Far East and called for all potential buyers to “put their money where their mouth is”.
Mass redundancies were prevented on Friday when all players accepted wage cuts of up to 75% for the rest of the season while Mervan Celik and Gregg Wylde left voluntarily.
Bids are being invited in the hope of saving the stricken Scottish champions, and Clark is eager to identify “serious” suitors as soon as possible.
Clark told the club’s website: “What we want is to have only serious bidders left by the end of the week.
“So anybody who has just been talking – and there are a few out there who have done a lot of talking – we want to seek them out and, as it were, put their money where their mouth is.
“Let’s get them round a table so we know how many parties we’ve got. I don’t care how many bidders we end up with but I want to know who they are, what they are and what their worth is, so then we can have more serious conversations about achieving the end goal which is to get Rangers under new ownership.
“This is the problem we have got, we have one or two parties prepared to talk to the media and then you have other parties who have been quietly and slowly and diligently getting on with their business behind closed doors outside of the glare of the media and we are taking them just as seriously as anybody who is on the front page of the newspapers saying, ‘I’m going to buy Rangers, you just watch’.
“If somebody wants to involve the media, that’s fine. And if they become the owner then they can sit on the front page of all the papers saying, ‘I did it’. But don’t be surprised if that owner isn’t one of the people who is media friendly.
“By the way, I am not ruling anybody out in this process, absolutely not. I’m just saying that nobody should assume that the only serious bidders are the ones who are in the public domain.”
Clark added: “I don’t want to be specific about bidders but there is at least one party from the Far East and we’ve had some interest as well from the American continent.
“We’re talking about Scotland, wider UK and some overseas parties. There’s been a number of meetings over the last few days and more planned for next week. I’ve got two calls to two different parties over the weekend. We have an online data room for those parties so they can go in and take information over and above what we’ve told them in our meetings.
“You’ve got different people asking different questions. We hope and believe that a new owner will be installed before the end of the season so that it’s not us in charge at season’s end. That’s our objective.
“What we’ve done so that people realise they need to speed themselves up is to say that on Friday we want to receive absolute proof of your funding so we understand who you are and which camp you are in because some people have feet in various camps.
“We want to know who exactly has your money. More importantly, we want some form of indicative bid, so that will distil down however many parties we have got at the moment to the final few.”
