I’ve been watching this Resolution 12 story unfolding for months now, and I’ve largely kept myself to myself on the issue, mostly because it’s not my purview and a lot of people were working away on it behind the scenes.
But lately, I’ve been asked what my view on the matter is and I feel that it’s time I gave an answer to that question.
I feel that a crime against sport has been committed here; that’s my take on it, pure and simple.
Not a crime against Celtic, but a crime against sport itself.
The costs to Celtic – somewhere in the region of £15 million – have been substantial, but the cost to the integrity of the game has been far higher and more damaging than that because it’s not a secret that this stinks and that the SFA had a duty which they neglected here.
They were also lied to by a member club, on whose board sat a man the same governing body declared was a “fit and proper person” even in light of his criminal conviction in South Africa. This tells you all you need to know about how seriously they take this matter.
A couple of sites have published the responses which Stewart Regan has sent out to Celtic fans in recent weeks, fans who, as shareholders, have written to him to ask him the questions he apparently didn’t want to answer.
His replies boil down to one thing; “Ask Celtic.”
I am no defender of the SFA.
Everyone who reads this blog knows I view them with undisguised hostility and contempt. I make that even clearer over on Fields, where I’ve let things slide a little in the last month or so but whose work I intend to get back to presently.
My feelings on Regan and Doncaster and others are all there for people to see.
But on this one, you know what? Regan’s right on the money.
This matter shouldn’t be the province of the individual shareholders. It’s not their job to find out why their shares lost value, why the business in which they had a stake was robbed of an eight figure sum of money and why even now the people responsible for administration during that period are going about their business quite the thing, and without opposition.
That job belongs to Celtic PLC itself.
That’s a fact.
I would love to believe that this will have a happy ending, where Rangers will be found to have corrupted the process, and the SFA admits that they were either culpable in allowing it or lax almost beyond belief. I would love UEFA to jump into the debate, and fix all this in the way that only they can, by investigating exactly what was going on in Scottish football in the years prior to Craig Whyte’s acquisition, and then liquidation, of Rangers.
I still hope for those things, and to a degree I still expect them, as much of it is now in the province of the courts and they will get to the bottom of certain issues.
But on this one, I am no longer a believer.
Last year, I had a look at this issue in some detail, and read up on the law.
For shareholders of a company to proceed against a regulatory body, that issue needs to be covered at an AGM and the organisation itself has to take that issue forward.
I cannot repeat this often enough; there is no provision, none, in the law, for shareholders to press for action against a regulatory agency or third party without the support of the company board of directors. It’s the board who has to act, because without them any attempted action carries no legal weight whatsoever.
Celtic shareholders could petition for a judicial review; the SFA’s answer to that will be that Celtic made enquiries on these issues and were given answers.
That will probably be enough to satisfy a judge as regards to the procedures being followed.
If Celtic itself took that action, citing a failure of procedure, that would have a different outcome.
Stewart Regan, for all his faults, is procedurally correct here.
There’s just no getting away from that fact.
Celtic is the stakeholder company. Individual shareholders have no right to answers from the SFA; the issue has to be pressed by Celtic itself, through its board, and through the proper avenues. Celtic have done that, but only to a certain extent.
Now, instead of taking the matter to a different stage, Celtic are asking shareholders to write to UEFA on an individual basis.
Are they serious?
If the SFA won’t take that kind of thing seriously the European governing body certainly won’t. They’ll ask if this matter was raised with the SFA first, and then why Celtic itself isn’t petitioning them as a club. They, too, will be procedurally and legally correct when they do.
Unless these inquiries come from Celtic, with the club putting its concerns front and centre, acting as an organisation that believes it has been wronged and deprived of cash, nobody in authority, anywhere, is going to entertain this issue, and that’s a stone cold fact and all the obfuscation and deflection in the world is not going to change it.
Why are Celtic not taking this matter seriously, and handling it properly?
I’ve heard reasons given which make no sense at all, including this “we want to protect our staff” nonsense.
I think it entirely logical that Celtic wants to protect the guy who works in the mail room. That’s nice, as far as it goes, but what does it say when they’re perfectly happy for Joe Bloggs from Cambuslang to do the heavy lifting instead?
Is his personal safety less of a concern to them?
He’s only a shareholder and season ticket owner, after all.
He doesn’t work where Peter Lawwell is in close proximity.
I also believe that this takes the individual crackpot more seriously than we should.
If the club really is holding back out of fear of what some angry lone nut might do then truly those who want to run Scottish football on threats and terror have won already and our club has raised the white flag for everyone to see.
I don’t believe it for a minute.
Those who say our club is working diligently behind the scenes may well be right, but I no longer have any faith in it.
I don’t see progress being made on this issue; I see people engaged in a very well structured dance around the edges of it. If our club wanted this matter resolved they would simply tell the SFA they’re not satisfied with the answers they’ve been given and are petitioning UEFA and giving the whole thing over to the lawyers.
I’ll tell you this much; Fergus McCann would never have stood for any of it.
He’d have driven a coach and horses through Hampden, and if that didn’t get him satisfaction he’d have done what he did with Jim Farry and taken the issue through the courts.
Fergus didn’t even allow the John Collins free transfer to Monaco go over without making a legal case of it.
Do you think he, for one second, would have allowed another club to deprive us of £15 million and upwards by taking a European place they had no business at all getting?
He would have driven a wrecking ball through the lot of them. Doncaster, Ogilvie, Regan and all … they’d have been gone, or forced to get in front of a judge as he made Farry do.
None of them would have stood up to that kind of scrutiny, under oath.
What I wouldn’t give to see someone like him in charge today.
Instead we have the people who allowed the Lord Nimmo Smith fiasco to be defined by the people who never wanted title stripping in the first place. Doncaster and Regan are still in their jobs, and Ogilvie was allowed to waltz off into the sunset with his pension and reputation largely intact. Real reform of the SFA has led nowhere, and we have an elected head of that organisation so completely incapable he can’t even draw balls out of a bowl without making a mess of it.
Where is Financial Fair Play? Where is a stricter Fit and Proper Person test? What exactly would happen if Sevco detonated like Rangers and a shady bunch of characters proposed Rangers III? Would another club be allowed to do what Rangers did, and rise again as a reanimated corpse, with, according to the SFA, all their history intact?
The “official line” out of the SFA on this is a sheer nonsense, playing only to a gallery of goons, and we know it … yet Celtic doesn’t even challenge that obvious fiction.
That we don’t know the answers to any of these huge questions, four years after these people nearly destroyed Scottish Football, tells you what the appetite for real change actually is. Nada. Zero. Nil. That Celtic plays its own part in this charade can no longer really be up for debate.
Because otherwise the club would lead, instead of asking the fans to.
To read a follow up piece, “Five Big Reasons Why Celtic Fans Don’t Trust The SFA At All” click here