Rangers haven't announced the new deal with SD. But given the previous contract with SD had expired, and SD had us in court yesterday for breach of contract, then a new deal has indeed been agreed. A contract must be in place with SD before it can be breached.
It could be that entering into the new deal with JD/Elite is indeed a breach of the old terms as we were not allowed to do that without allowing SDI to match it.
Did we show them the Elite terms before engaging them as distributors/retail partners?
I suspect this is more complex than it may seem on the surface.
I'm not convinced we have closed the deal out with SDI on the matched terms, etc and instead both sides have been haggling over specifics they wanted tightened up around exclusivity. If we interpret that one way, while they interpret it the other, we may have decided to push ahead with Elite on the basis of our interpretation of our rights - which is what SDI are now seeking an injunction on sales to dispute in court.
As I said earlier, as much as we may have anticipated a return to court (many of us punters did as well) there's little doubt the move to sell kit via Elite/JD has been a deliberate one to assert a position and move things along.
SDI will (in my opinion) be quite happy to have us back in front of a judge - they tried to book the time in previously.
My gut tells me this move by the board was less about the strength of our position and more about simply getting some momentum, rather than be stuck in a perpetual contract negotiation with a "partner" who is in no hurry to meet halfway.
By entering into the Elite deal and kicking SDI into dragging us back to court, at least it puts a timeline in place to get some decisions made.
Again though, my gut is telling me we're not entirely likely to get our desired outcome once that happens, as we've already seen a few times, commercial law does not seem to favour the common sense aspect of leeches like MA. He's had too much success, despite the negative publicity, political involvement and interrogation of his methods for me to feel confident a judge will call a spade a c#nt and kick him into touch because it's the morally right thing to do.