Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  To the astonishment of no one, the investigation, led by legal firm Pinsent Masons, refuted the idea of a close link with Whyte, but Green was eventually hounded out of town and details of the report were not published. The problems and the turmoil at the phoenix club were perhaps best illustrated when McCoist announced over the summer of 2013 that he was delighted with the permanent appointment of CEO Craig Mather, who had replaced the hastily departed Green on an interim basis in April. ‘I’m on the same wavelength as Craig. We can go for a beer and he likes a bit of Bruce Springsteen, just like me,’ the manager confided. ‘I’ve been working with Craig over players and pre-season and him and I are getting on really, really well,’ McCoist claimed, in a rare instance of a manager giving the chief executive his vote of confidence.

  Gradually, however, over the next few years, the internecine squabbling at Ibrox swelled to reach epic proportions. Matters came to a head at an Extraordinary General Meeting in March 2015 when a group of ‘requisitioners’, led by former Oldco directors Dave King and Paul Murray, finally gained control of the club and ousted members of the sitting board including James Easdale and chairman David Sommers as well as chief executive Derek Llambias, a business associate of the Sports Direct magnate Mike Ashley, who had bought shares in the club following Green’s acquisition and whose loans were now helping to keep the struggling company afloat.

  What stood out for many was the tax-fiddling past of some of those involved in the squabble over the Ibrox brand, leading Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News to observe that Rangers were ‘probably the most tax-toxic sporting institution in Britain’; football board chairman Sandy Easdale, brother of ousted director James, had been jailed in the 1990s for VAT fraud, while King, their intended usurper, had accrued a remarkable 41 criminal convictions in South Africa relating to income tax breaches and been branded a ‘glib and shameless liar’ and a ‘mendacious witness whose evidence should not be accepted on any issue’ by a judge in that country. Such was King’s toxicity that, following his coup, no bank would lend money or offer overdraft facilities to the Ibrox entity and the club’s nominated advisor, or NOMAD, WH Ireland, the firm which ran their listing on the stock exchange, resigned, causing shares in the company to be suspended and ultimately delisted, after King was subsequently unable to secure a replacement. To anyone who was familiar with this story, however, it came as no surprise when King found himself free to assume the chairmanship of Newco after the SFA ruled that he was a ‘fit and proper person’ to take charge of the club.

  By this time, a very strange thing seemed to have happened with regards to the new Ibrox entity; certain media outlets, who had confirmed the demise and death of Rangers, and all its history, when the club was consigned to liquidation, now instead started talking in mysterious terms of ‘a traumatic summer for the club’ following the events of June and July 2012, while others began referring retrospectively to ‘some initial confusion’ at the time over the universal response to HMRC’s decision to vote down Charles Green’s CVA offer. Everyone had naturally assumed that bankruptcy and liquidation spelled the end of the club which had dominated Scottish football for 140 years, but Newco Rangers, on their website and elsewhere, had always maintained that they were still the same club. For the most part, this was largely seen as defiance and an attempt to sell season tickets, but it now seemed that the Ibrox club really had risen from the grave, and liquidation, the terminal end which had to be avoided at all costs, was now viewed as merely something that had happened to somebody else.

  It was the company, Scottish football was latterly informed, namely The Rangers Football Club plc, Company Number SC004276 and incorporated in May 1899, which had died, while the ethereal ‘club’, along with all its history and heritage, had in fact survived the insolvency process and been bought up by Green as part of his acquisition. References to Green’s purchase of the ‘business and assets’ of Rangers were amended to the ‘business, history and assets’ and anyone who suggested otherwise, or used references to Rangers being a ‘new club’ or a ‘relaunched club’ would face public intimidation and be flooded with abusive communications.

  Nobody in their right mind was claiming that the Ibrox supporters shouldn’t continue to follow the new entity as if it were the old Rangers, and carry the club with them in their hearts, but that was not what was happening, with everyone from Rangers fans and directors to the media who had buried the club, to SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster now claiming that the old and the new Rangers were legally one and the same thing, and woe betide anyone who should suggest otherwise. It wasn’t long before the ‘same club’ contention became the almost universally accepted position in Scottish football, except among fans of other clubs, needless to say, who, despite being the only group not to have performed an Orwellian volte-face on the issue, were once again marginalised and denigrated for alleged narrow-mindedness by the more powerful mainstream narrative.

  ‘Rangers’ seemed to be having their cake and eating it, keeping the parts of the old club which they liked, such as its history and honours, but conveniently shedding its debts and responsibilities, including any potential sanctions as a result of the SPL inquiry into the alleged use of undisclosed payments to players at Ibrox, as Ewan Murray observed in The Guardian, ‘The Rangers public relations stance is that the club remain the same as ever, history intact, despite the fresh corporate identity created by liquidation. It would be an obvious stance were it not contradicted by insistence from within Ibrox that the club should not be retrospectively punished if found guilty of illegally registering players during use of the now infamous employee benefit trust scheme.’

  And what of the said infamous, tax-dodging scheme? To general astonishment, not least among those associated with Rangers, the First Tier Tribunal returned a verdict which found in the Ibrox club’s favour, by a margin of two to one, in November 2012. HMRC immediately launched an appeal against the decision that the EBTs were for the most part used lawfully by the Ibrox club, sparking off another legal merry-go-round in the various courts and producing a delay which benefited Rangers in the long run in two important ways: firstly, it allowed the SPL inquiry into the matter of undisclosed payments to players, chaired by Lord William Nimmo Smith, to proceed on the basis that the EBTs were perfectly legal. The inquiry subsequently found that the use of EBTs conferred no sporting advantage on Rangers, presumably because such a perfectly lawful scheme was open to every other club, if only they’d had the gumption to use it, and the dreaded ‘title-stripping’ of trophies won between 2001 and 2010 did not take place.

  Nimmo Smith’s findings hung on the evidence of Sandy Bryson, the SFA’s head of registrations, who maintained in his submission to the inquiry that a player’s registration is valid once it is logged with the governing body, and remains so for the duration of his contract, regardless of whether there are subsequent breaches of the rules, such as failure to disclose the player’s full salary. Rangers, it seemed, had escaped title-stripping on a technicality, but in other regards Nimmo Smith was scathing of the club’s conduct during the period in question, particularly over its persistent reluctance to disclose information and to co-operate with the regulatory bodies.

  This did not seem to matter, however, because the humiliating prospect of seeing trophies struck from the record books had been avoided, much to Green’s elation. The Newco owner appeared on Sky Sports News, once the judge had published his report in February 2013, talking of Rangers’ ‘innocence’, despite Nimmo Smith imposing a £250,000 fine on the liquidated club, while former chairman Sir David Murray, under whose ownership the scheme had been introduced, was equally relieved. ‘The imposition of an irrecoverable fine on an entity which is now in liquidation is futile… It is saddening that so much time, effort and money has been expended in pursuing a retrospective witch hunt against an entity in crisis,’ Murray crowed.

  Secondly, the length of time taken by the judicial process to eventually reach a final, binding verdict on Rangers’ use of
EBTs allowed enough of an interval to pass for the regulatory bodies to attempt to put the whole matter behind them. The SPL and the SFL were no longer in existence, having been amalgamated into the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) by the time of the verdict from the Supreme Court in July 2017, which upheld an earlier decision to overturn the original judgment and ruled in HMRC’s favour.

  In the light of the new evidence, now confirmed some seven years after the case became public, that Rangers had effectively cheated both Scottish football and the British taxpayer for ten years or more, the league’s senior counsel, Gerry Moynihan QC, nevertheless advised the SPFL that it had ‘no power in law’ to revisit the Nimmo Smith commission and in particular the finding that Rangers ‘did not gain any unfair competitive advantage’ during the EBT years. Instead, SPFL chairman Ralph Topping proposed an independent review into ‘Scottish football’s actions and processes’ over the affair and invited the SFA to agree terms of reference for such a review. But to the astonishment of no one, the governing body issued a statement declaring that the image of the game in Scotland would only be damaged further by ‘raking over the coals’ of the whole Rangers fiasco and declined the offer to participate in the review, claiming that it would serve no meaningful purpose, with former SFA vice-president Rod Petrie and others urging people to ‘move on’ from the whole debacle. It is perhaps not surprising, for those involved in Scottish football at least, that when Shakespeare’s Hamlet spoke of ‘the law’s delay’ in his famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy, he was contemplating suicide at the time.

  Nevertheless, Rangers’ disgrace was ultimately confirmed by the verdict of the Supreme Court in London, meaning that everything achieved by the club over the relevant period would be tainted by the industrial scale use of an illegitimate tax avoidance scheme, which, in a wage meritocracy such as professional football, gave Rangers a clear and obvious competitive advantage over opponents who were meeting their obligations to the tax authorities in full and registering their players in accordance with the SFA’s Articles of Association.

  The Ibrox club won five league titles this century, by an aggregate total of just 12 points, with four of those triumphs not settled until the final day of the season. Rivals Celtic, meanwhile, lifted the championship trophy seven times over the same period, winning by huge margins on most occasions, so there was no doubt which club was dominating and what the EBTs, and the subsequent advantages conferred by small margins, allowed Rangers to achieve in those tight seasons. Celtic were cheated the most; they were involved in a direct, head-to-head rivalry and they lost leagues by the narrowest of margins, and cup finals and semi-finals to last-minute goals and extra-time winners scored by the Ibrox club.

  It was by no means just they who lost out though; it could certainly be argued that the real victims of Rangers’ malpractices were the smaller, provincial clubs, the ones who were working within their means, once administration had cleared out most of the chancers, and often trying to meekly live off slices from the Old Firm’s banquet. Week in, week out and in very much straitened circumstances, these teams were facing a financially doped monster, which was not playing by the same rules as everyone else, and particular sympathy must go to those sides who lost to Rangers in cup finals – the Queen of the Souths and Ayr Uniteds of this world – who were denied a once-in-a-generation or a once-ina-lifetime opportunity for sporting glory and missed out on adding a special bit of history to their often lean existences.

  ‘Rangers’ eventually made their way through the lower leagues, but failed to gain promotion from the second-tier Scottish Championship at the first attempt, beaten to the title by Hearts’ team of talented youngsters before being crushed 6-1 on aggregate by Motherwell in a Premiership play-off.

  The recast club had spent not three but four years out of the top flight and still ‘Armageddon’ failed to materialise for Scottish football. In fact, despite everything, and notwithstanding the appalling lack of finance which continues to hinder the game’s progress at club level, Scottish football remains in a remarkably vibrant condition, all things considered, with the evident affinity and widespread support which still exists for the game of football in Scotland seemingly undiminished by the off-field trauma which has often been inflicted upon it down the years.

  The future for Scottish football remains bright, it seems, but that, assuredly, is no thanks to Rangers.

  SELECTED

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