THE full extent of Rangers’ excesses during Sir David Murray’s reign were laid bare last night.
Record Sport can reveal documentation which shows Stefan Klos was paid more than £8million over four and half years at Ibrox.
The keeper received a basic salary of £4.5m, a loyalty bonus of £1m, win and appearance money totalling £500,000 and raked in £2m from the EBT scheme making him one of the world’s highest-paid footballers at that time.
The German’s pay packet was almost on a par with those of David Beckham, Steve McManaman and Brazilian superstar Ronaldo.
Klos is back in the spotlight as the astonishing scale of the tax avoidance scheme which has brought the club to the brink of collapse was exposed.
The Ibrox hero, who made more than 200 appearances for the club between 1998 and 2007, was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Employee Benefit Trusts which are threatening to destroy the club’s 140-year history.
The vast sums of cash paid to more than 80 members of staff over and above their normal salaries are at the root of the Big Tax Case which could see Rangers hit with a £75m fine.
Klos was the third highest earner from the EBT scheme behind former team skipper Barry Ferguson and Murray, the man who introduced the controversial tax trust.
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Murray was paid £6.3m during his period at the Ibrox helm, Ferguson raked in £2.5m while the German keeper had £2m paid into an offshore account between December 1998 and June 2003.
A copy of Klos’s contract, obtained by Record Sport and which was lodged with the SPL, details his amazing renumeration package – but there is no mention on the document about an EBT.
The terms of the former Borussia Dortmund keeper’s deal highlight the astronomical amounts Murray was splashing out in a bid to bring the best players from around Europe to Glasgow.
Ronald de Boer, Arthur Numan, Tore Andre Flo and Dado Prso were lured on similar packages as Rangers beat off stiff competition for their signatures.
In the current climate where mind-boggling contracts are the norm in most of Europe’s top leagues the money paid to Klos does not seem to be unduly excessive.
However, back then the £2m a year he coined in at Rangers put him on a par with the world’s elite.
According to Forbes magazine in 2001, McManaman was listed as high as sixth on the list of highest earning footballers on the planet after earning £9m in his four seasons with Real Madrid.
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Ronaldo was the world’s best paid player at the time although the £5m he earned in a year at Inter Milan was largely made up of advertising and sponsorship.
Beckham, who was still with Manchester United at the time, had an annual salary of £3.6m but again a large portion of that came from independent endorsements and not from the Old Trafford club.