Craig Whyte Decides Not To Pay. Who Knew What And When?
The bill was outstanding in March, at the end of which the first phase of the licensing rules kicked in.
The license should have been refused then, until the club could demonstrate that this bill had been settled.
Yet the licensing process rolled on.
It was still outstanding in April, and in that month it appeared as a bill payable in Rangers accounts.
Yet the licensing process rolled on.
It was still outstanding, in fact, in May when Craig Whyte bought Rangers for £1.
He met HMRC almost immediately, who told him they didn’t regard the matter as even remotely up for debate.
They told him to pay, at once.
Did he inform the SFA of this?
He must have told them something, because the SFA’s claim that they did everything by the book has always been that the club was granted a license, until Article 50 of the regulations, because this bill was under appeal and therefore didn’t count as a “liabilities payable” to a tax authority.
The decision to award the license was made on 31 May.
Any evidence of an appeal or “discussions” between Rangers and HMRC which would have allowed the SFA to waive the license through, had to be submitted for final analysis by 30 June.
No such paperwork was ever submitted to the SFA and there’s no indication that they ever sought any.
They didn’t ask Rangers for more details, or proof that this matter had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. They didn’t ask HMRC for confirmation that the matter was still in dispute. They either took Rangers’ word for these things or they simply neglected their duties completely and ignored dissenting voices.
We now know there was no appeal.
How do we know that?
We know it because sheriff officers served Rangers with a Final Demand on 2 June that year and that doesn’t happen if something’s under appeal.
Besides, an appeal was ludicrous in that case as anyone with the slightest knowledge of the law would have been able to tell the SFA from the first.
The Aberdeen Asset Management case was the legal ground on which HMRC stood.
It was rock solid confirmation that every single organisation that had used a Discounted Options Scheme had been in violation of the law.
They all owed money at that point. Rangers’ own lawyer had told them that. He had told them to pay up in full.
30 June came and went. As far as UEFA was concerned all was well.
The SFA raised no issue with them, as far as we can tell.
They allowed Rangers to get the license.
We don’t know what they told UEFA but they can’t have raised any concerns.
In August that year, after Rangers were already out of both European competitions this issue exploded like an atom bomb.
That’s when the real cover-up started.