SFA Grants King Fit & Proper Person Status On A Day That Brings Shame To Scottish Football
Today the SFA made their inevitable decision and passed Dave King “fit and proper” to become chairman of Sevco Rangers.
The announcement has not come as a surprise, but it obliterates any claim the SFA has left of being a moral authority in the Scottish game.
Mark my words, today is a day of shame for the game here and something that in the fullness of time we are going to sorely regret.
Criminals now have free reign to take over clubs.
They have been given the green light.
The door is now wide open to all manner of abuses and violations of laws and regulatory charters.
There has never been a more abhorrent, scandalous decision in the history of our national sport.
I wrote a piece earlier today about how King clearly fails on several of the “fit and proper person” criteria.
The media campaign to distract from this has been long and has ultimately proved successful.
The SFA has ignored past precedents and what’s written down, in clear language, in their own guidelines.
Faith in our “governing body” has crashed to hitherto unplumbed depths.
Scottish football governance is now in the toilet.
This moment represents the point where the SFA “jumped the shark.”
For the record; David Cunningham King, the “glib and shameless liar” pled guilty to over forty separate income tax charges that on another day would have earned him two years apiece in prison, or a grand total of 80 some years in all.
Rangers Football Club, the ghost of which is now free to put him on the board, was liquidated after HMRC refused a CVA on the grounds that the club had deliberately withheld tax payable.
They were already investigating the club – and the board on which King sat – in relation to hundreds of other charges in what has now become known as the Big Tax Case.
The tax dodging for which they were eventually liquidated was the work of Craig Thomas Whyte, on whose board King also served.
In the past few years, others, such as Rafat Rizvi, wanted by Interpol on hundreds of fraud charges, have been linked to various boards and Sandy Easdale, who recently served as a director, has actually served a prison term for VAT fraud.
If you’re asking me is Dave King “fit and proper” to sit with those men, to continue in their name, then the answer would have to be yes.
Indeed, I can think of no-one more fit and proper than a convicted tax cheat to sit on the board of a phoenix company liquidated over unpaid tax.
It’s a marriage made in Heaven.
But that’s not the question, and it wasn’t the issue.
The issue is this;
Was Dave King a fit and proper person to sit on the board of a Scottish football club?
The answer to that is clearly, unequivocally, no but today the licensing body of Scottish football, in violation of its own charter, in contravention of its own rules, and sticking two big fingers up to every person in the game who plays by those rules, has disagreed.
It’s over with. I’ll never set foot in a Scottish football stadium again.
Because this will only continue as long as we allow it to.
Our own clubs don’t get out of this with a shred of credit either.
The SFA Board that rubberstamped this lamentable, disgraceful decision is made up of chairmen and officials at our clubs and there is no get out for those people when it comes time to account for this.
This decision reveals how completely the game here has descended into the gutter.
No amount of misplaced euphoria over a couple of commercial deals disguises the fact that it is led by spineless, yellow men who have no place trying to run a modern organisation.
They are cowardly, they are weak and they are corrupt.
As long as our game continues to be in the hands of such men we will not move forward.
We’ve all banged our heads against the wall over the SFA’s behaviour in the past.
It gets to the point where you realise that all you’re doing is damaging your head, and to a lesser degree the wall itself.
But it does not effect change. It does not alter a thing.
That’s what has to change first.
Our impotence in the face of these flagrant scandals.
Talking is not going to do it.
Our game is in the hands of certifiable morons and institutional idiots.
Over the next few days we’re going to hear excuses and attempts at explaining this decision, as though we were the stupid ones … and the one thing they will all have in common is that they will be predicated on us being just that.
This is a black, black day for our national sport.
Corruption and criminality have now been okayed by the governing body, in a complete capitulation which, again, seeks to benefit just one football team, at the expense of every other aspect of the game.
I personally do not care about King.
His “financial muscle” remains to be seen.
I think he talks more than he actually acts, and the troubles facing he and his shambolic football team will give him far more headaches than they will days in the sun.
My gripe is with the shameless, sycophantic weaklings at the SFA.
Today is a day of infamy for them.
Another in a long line of them.
(James Forrest has written a more detailed piece on this subject over on On Fields of Green. Read it at the link below.)
Thanks to everyone on the Rangers fan forums reading today.
Our excuse is that this is a major issue affecting Scottish football.
What’s yours? Are you obsessed?