When the Bells ring out for New Year in a few short weeks, we’ll almost be at the fifth anniversary of Craig Whyte’s decision to put Rangers into administration. We all know what followed, and we all know what followed that. From the CVA rejection, through the SFA’s rule breaking and the Five Way Agreement, to the creation and inflation of the Survival and Victim Lies all the way through to the present day.
It’s a diabolical story that isn’t finished unfolding.
At the back of all of it are the half-remembered victims of David Murray’s regime and the eventual short-lived reign of Craig Whyte; the creditors of Rangers, who were left shafted and are still high and dry all these years later.
You cannot look at the SPL table today, and listen to the self-congratulatory nonsense wafting out of Ibrox, without feeling revulsion at how easily, how quickly, the plight of those people has been erased from the collective memory over there. Indeed, those people never mattered to The Peepul at all. Innocent victims? Collateral damage, more like. Just pawns to be sacrificed in pursuit of the objective; the grand old days of yore all over again.
I’ve been covering Scottish football stories, and those out of Ibrox especially, since 2008 or thereabouts. The intervening years have taught me that it’s just when you think you’ve seen it all that another shockwave hits you. I’ve never known anything like what happened in 2012, and I had a front row seat to it, as myself and the rest of the editorial team at CQN Magazine tried to keep up with revelation after revelation and development after development.
Much of what we knew never even made it into the public domain.
The second article I ever published over on Fields was about the momentous cost of what Rangers did during the time of EBT’s and beyond to 2012, the colossal, staggering, public cost of their years of tax dodging and dependence on the largesse of banks, debts which were also taken from the public purse eventually.
It still shocks me today to look back at those figures and what they represented; not a fraud against football, but the taking of tens of millions of pounds from your pockets and mine, not to mention public services, to fund the greed and avarice of a football club.
This has never been “just a sports story” to me.
The cash they took out of the economy could have employed 5000 police officers. Or 4400 firemen. It could have fully funded Sure Start Scotland. Every primary school in Scotland could have got £43,000. Every secondary school could have got £250,000. The National Children’s Music Fund was capped at £10 million at the time. Their tax liability could have funded it for the better part of a decade. The legacy costs of the Private Finance Initiative – money that is leeched out of our national economy year in year out as a result of that diabolical policy mistake – could have been reduced by a staggering 30%.
This is the size of what we’re talking about.
And behind it all were the little creditors, the small businesses and the individuals who might only have lost a few hundred pounds but who were impacted by that in ways we’ll never fully comprehend. Who missed out on things. Who had to make sacrifices for acts that were none of their fault. They haven’t been paid one thin dime.
People in the media who pretend not to understand why the anger over Sevco being allowed to get away with overspending, or who kid on they don’t get why those tainted titles matter or why the Survival Lie needs to be blown apart, do those people an immense disservice.
Had the impact of years of cheating been limited to matters on the pitch that would have been one thing; in those circumstances their obtuseness could have been rationalised. But the behaviour of that club went far beyond what happened on the park.
There should have been consequences for that.
The idea that the club itself could simply walk away from those debts and re-assume business as usual … it’s loathsome. It’s disgusting. There’s no excuse for allowing it, and the issue still rankles many of us today because of it.
And it didn’t stop at the gates of Ibrox either; this was aided and abeted by the SFA and by people at the SPL, Neil Doncaster foremost amongst them. He and Regan knew full well that Whyte and the club were trading whilst insolvent. They knew all those creditors were being duped and would never see their money except as terms in a CVA, where they’d be lucky to get pennies in the pound. Did the governing bodies help perpetrate a fraud?
I’ve always believed so.
2017 will be a red-letter year for those people.
The Big Tax Case will finally be settled in the Supreme Court.
HMRC will try to claw back some of the money the tax-payer is owed. That’s their job, that’s their wider social responsibility. The horrible irony is that if they win, the little guys, the small businesses, the sole traders, will get even less.
But this case is important. It has to be seen through, no matter what. Because this is too big to be let rest.
At the SFA and the SPL Doncaster and Regan better brace for impact, because the consequences to them, if HMRC pull it off, might not stop with another campaign for title stripping. If what Rangers did is branded criminal, then people should ask who knew what and when. It’s another major set of questions for the already convicted chairman of the club, Dave King, who sat on the board at the time. The case will yet have the power to stalk Campbell Ogilvie in his scandalised retirement.
In the meantime, Sevco sits second in the league, claiming the history but washing their hands of the responsibility. The holes in the regulations that enabled them to do it are still there, as wide as ever, only now we have, on the record, the shameful words of Neil Doncaster which give license to other clubs which want to dump debts and go the NewCo route. Instead of learning how to stop this, clubs now have a blueprint for following the Sevco path.
This year, a group of Celtic fans tried to do what the clubs – their own included – have singularly failed to do and which the media has no interest in; they tried to hold the governing bodies to account. If that was a failure it was not because they failed but because so many others failed them. If they’ve gone down, they did it fighting all the way, for the benefit of the whole game. That so few elsewhere came to their aid is an indictment on many in the sport and on its periphery that will not be forgotten as time marches on.
And neither will the creditors of 2012.
May the coming year be the one where some small measure of justice is done for them.