Thursday was one of those days when you get off to
a bad start early on - and the rest of the day generally doesn't get much better, and it
didn’t. One of my three sons is up from London and we’re both having a day
mountaineering in the Cairngorms. At Queen Street Station I’m trying to buy one
of those ‘Grab a bag’ crisps at WH Smith. There is no assistant in sight and
I’m faced with one of these robotic check-out machines, can it weigh a 50 gram pack
of crisps? No it can’t and the robot tells me to find an assistant.
As I turn around to look for a human - standing
there right behind me is the former Conservative Party leader Annabel Goldie,
she has the same problem (amongst many others). Over comes a sleepy looking guy
and he sorts her out first. Beaten by a Tory wow that was a bad start for me!
My train is 11 mins late in leaving and I’ve an 8 min changeover to make at
Perth. My education at Lourdes Sen Sec in Glasgow tells me I’m 3 minutes out
& I’ll never catch it and will have to wait in Perth for not far off
another 2 hours. No I’m not having that!
20 minutes from Perth I ask the Scotrail guy, “I’m catching a connection at Perth to
Aviemore, do you think the connecting train will wait a few minutes?” In
his finest gruffness he says “Trains
don’t wait for people mate”. Okay, I can see I’m dealing with eloquence
here and I have to turn up the volume. “Its
Scotrail’s fault I’m in this position, therefore can you not radio ahead and
ask them to wait for their customers coming off this train”
He looks like he doesn’t like my question, and my
look tells him I have no wish to hang around a frozen Perth station for ages.
He does his job and we make it on the connecting train. Result yes. My only one
of the day (I even took time to help an aging Canadian lady from Toronto
en-route to Inverness with her case. For fox sake I’m asking, how about a bit
of karma coming my way now?) I look into Twitter and I notice Chris McLaughlin
from the BBC is tweeting that there will be no ‘stripping of titles’ from what
was RFC. I’m seriously trying to lift myself after that when I get two tweets
within seconds. One from a Rangers fan who says“He hopes I disappear up that mountain” along with a few other
scorns on my character. Good wishes ranged from “Don’t jump off when you hear the news Matt” and also from a buddy
@mijass in Edinburgh saying “Have a nice
day with your lad, you’ll be glad you’re out of it today (Lord Nimmo
Smith’s report), but it will be waiting
for you when your back)” The weather was poor in the Cairngorms and our
trip wasn’t safe to proceed with after 2 hours, so down we came and to one
local pub hosted by a few Celts barmen to the good. Therefore here I was in the
Cairngorms to give my head a good hoovering in some alpine air with my son I
haven’t seen for 6 months and all I’m left with is this Nimmo Smith’s report.
Therefore down to business and time to go through
Lord Nimmo Smith and his two QC’s, Charles Flint & Nicholas Stewart findings.
One thing was for sure, these guys will go by every inch of the law, which
always comes before the incompetence of others, in this case the Scottish
Football Association. Out of their depth is too mild a phrase to use for this
organisation. I’ll cut to the chase on the important mechanics of this because
it’s the fine detail that undoubtedly matters.
The Commission stated “Rangers FC did not gain any unfair competitive advantage from the
contraventions of the SPL rules in failing to make proper disclosure of the
side letter arrangements, nor did the non-disclosure have the effect that any
of the registered players were ineligible to play and, for this and other
reasons, no sporting sanction or penalty should be imposed on Rangers FC”
Okay, so in the above it’s crystal clear. RFC ARE
GUILTY OF CONTRAVENING THE SPL RULES.
The commission added “We take the view that the nondisclosure must be regarded as deliberate,
in the sense that a decision was taken that the side letters need not be or
should not be disclosed. No steps were taken to check, even on a hypothetical
basis, the validity of that assumption with the SPL or the SFA.”
The above paragraph is very important, because what it tells you is that RFC majorly ‘chanced their arm’ here and the SFA in their best Dumb & Dumber act didn’t have a structure in place to insert the word ‘loans’ into their rules. Even although there was a rule about side letters in contracts. The biggest dumb act of the SFA, aided and abetted by the SPL under various chiefs was that RFC did disclose the EBT’s in their annual accounts via their board, a board to which Campbell Ogilvie was a member of, and who approved these statuary accounts. Even although he said these EBT’s were not within the scope of his remit at Rangers. The SFA are where the player registrations are stored after being sent from the SPL. Yet they did not even notice these EBT’s in their accounts throughout all these years. Very peculiar!
The reason RFC got away with this ‘chancing their arms on loans’ is because neither of the above governing body picked it up. And by the time it was brought to their notice - all the prime witness in this investigation Sandy Bryson, the SFA’s Head of Registrations, could say when under questioning, “Was that a player, once registered with the ruling body, remained registered with them until such time as his contract ended or that player left their club’s employment.”
Therefore, even though the absolute details of his contract had been deliberately kept from the SPL, and at the point of registration at the SFA, and or any other breach that had occurred, that registration, once accepted, would stand. Its clear here that the SFA by sheer incompetence screwed up. Nimmo Smith after being in knowledge of that evidence knew fine that if the SFA hadn’t done their work properly then how could he judge against what they themselves had set-up!
The independent commission
therefore went by that slackness, loophole if you want, via the SFA
registrations procedure. It was almost as if Nimmo Smith & the 2 QC’s were
saying ‘If you guys are too thick to make rules correctly then what do you really
expect us to do, they’re your rules!’
For Rangers part in all this they operated a secret £47m
fund that nobody knew about. Yet one look at their accounts showed it there. They
were fly and devious and not once did they attempt to ever ask for legal advice
on it. They knew the SPL/SFA weren’t the brightest tools in the box and despite
what way Nimmo Smith and his two QC’s viewed it or interpreted it, RFC in my
and many peoples’ opinion, did gain ‘competitive advantage’ with these loans. They
attracted players to Ibrox over the years because of that very fact, players who would
never have went near them.
Since the findings, the triumphalism from Ibrox has
been sickening. As is the same line from their ex-players. As is their selection
box of gimps in the media.
RFC were found guilty on three counts. That’s
the verdict and they are as guilty as hell on sporting integrity. Integrity,
now there’s a word which they’re finding real difficulty in spelling
