[ffc-gallery]
Click on the picture to continue …
[/ffc-gallery]
A lot of Celtic fans are sick of the saga of Resolution 12.
Even more actually don’t fully understand what the whole thing is about.
It’s for those guys, more even than those who’ve been following the campaign with interest, who I want to address this article to.
Resolution 12 is important. It’s especially important right now, with the SFA due to make a licensing decision on whether Sevco should be allowed to play in Europe next season should they manage to squeeze past Hibs in the Scottish Cup Final.
Although a lot of focus amongst Celtic fans is on what happens within our own club – as it should be at a time like this – many believe it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the big picture, and that we keep on pushing on those issues which are important not just to us but to the wider game here in Scotland.
This is one of them.
Here is part of the background to this.
Celtic fans need to give it one last push, including getting in touch with the club itself, to see that justice is done here.
First, Remember: This Was a Crime Against More Than Just Celtic
Often forgotten about, but a salient point nonetheless; this campaign is not just about Celtic and Celtic fans.
There’s more at stake here than just the cash that Celtic would have gotten from playing in the Champions League in season 2011-12.
Let’s start with this.
Had Rangers not been given a licence, Kilmarnock would have qualified to play in Europe that year.
That ought to mean something to their supporters, as their club hasn’t qualified for Europe since. In fact, they’ve not come close to their fifth place finish of that season. Indeed, it was the last time they finished in the top six.
They are currently battling in the relegation play-off zone.
Would Kilmarnock have benefited from a European run?
Would it have changed the trajectory of their club?
Difficult to say, but it couldn’t have hurt them.
On top of that, our other European qualifiers would all have moved up a round in their respective competitions. Would that have made a big difference to them? We’ll never know, but Hearts and Dundee Utd definitely deserve answers to these questions as much as Celtic and Kilmarnock fans do.
As much as anything else, what happened here was a clear and flagrant violation of the rules of our game. No European license should have been awarded when the Wee Tax Case remained unpaid, and to say the SFA knew nothing about it is like a joke.
Everyone knew that bill was due, and everyone knew it had to be paid.
And when I say everyone, I mean everyone …. and there’s evidence which proves it.
A Document Signed By A Conflicted Administrator
I’m not going to go over every piece of evidence the Requisitioners have amassed during their time on the case. For one thing, not even I’ve seen it all but the word from inside the circle is that this isn’t just a stone wall but a brick bunker too. It’s overwhelming, enough to have heads rolling inside and outside the association.
I want to focus on just a few key pieces of information.
The SFA has known about them from the start. It would have been hard not to. Their President was involved in drawing up the first of them and he would have been informed, very quickly, about the existence of the second, especially in light of what the first says.
The first piece of evidence is a piece of paper dating back a while; to 1999. It is the document that established the Discounted Options Scheme, the Wee Tax Case itself, on which the Rangers licensing issue hinges. What you have to understand, and what some people still don’t realise, is that it was Campbell Ogilvie himself who set that scheme up.
It’s his signature on the paper. The importance of that can’t be overstated.
Four years later, Discounted Options Schemes were made illegal.
They weren’t just closed down, they were made criminal. HMRC started investigating every organisation they knew had such a scam going, in an effort to get back the money.
Rangers never volunteered the information that they had one.
That didn’t become known to the tax man until 2007, when Fraud Squad officers raided Ibrox in connection with a case they had running. The investigation centred on backhanders and shady transfer deals; it involved Rangers via the Jean Alain Boumsong transfer to Newcastle.
Fraud officers found nothing that proved that deal was dodgy, but they did find evidence that Murray and his companies were running a tax avoidance scam. They confiscated computers and files. Everything was turned over to HMRC, who got their first look at the books and got ready to act on what was in them.
In 2010, HMRC won the Aberdeen Asset Management case, which allowed them to go after every company in the country which run a Discounted Options Scheme. They immediately sent a bill Rangers way, in late November or early December, and amongst the documents they asked for were any contracts or letters relating to the payment of this scheme.
Campbell Ogilvie knew those documents existed, as the scheme’s author.
He would have known they were being concealed from the SFA, where he was one of the Vice Presidents.
It is inconceivable that he wasn’t informed when the club refused HMRC’s settlement offer and at the same denied that side letters and contracts had formed part of the scheme.
I do not believe people at Ibrox would have kept that from him.
If I’m right, he was a willing party to a tax fraud.
He would have known, then, that Rangers was not going to pay that bill and that it was now due.
As a former club director, he’d have known exactly what it meant to be involved in a dispute with HMRC over a tax liability like that. The Aberdeen Asset Management case had made it clear that the Revenue and Customs were on rock solid legal ground.
He would also have known it put the club in violation of licensing regulations.
And the second document makes matters even worse.
Rangers Own Lawyer Tells Them To Plead No Contest And Pay
In February 2011, just months before the SFA licensing criteria had to be met, HMRC sent a demand to the club for immediate payment of the Discounted Options Scheme plus penalties.
In that demand, Revenue and Customs made it abundantly clear that they considered the scheme to have been fraudulent and they revealed their knowledge of the side letters and contracts.
This was devastating to Rangers, because they had initially denied these things existed, proving to HMRC that they were planning a wholescale cover up of what they’d been doing. HMRC made it plain that they were taking these denials into account.
Again, I cannot believe Campbell Ogilvie was not made aware of this.
Andrew Thornhill, Rangers lawyer, was sent HMRC’s letter and he gave the club unequivocal advice on the matter.
He told them to settle, in particular as a result of those side letters and that the club had initially tried to deny they existed.
Thornhill’s letter is the second smoking gun, because it strips away any doubt that Rangers wilfully lied to HMRC and had no intention of paying that bill.
After his legal intervention, they decided that they would.
They had little option.
A meeting was scheduled with HMRC for March, and there they came up with a provisional payment schedule, which the club was supposed to get back to them on.
We know it was never paid.
So what happened?
Craig Whyte did.
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.
A Visit From The Sheriff Officers And Panic At Hampden
On 10 August the sheriff officers returned to Ibrox, but this time the media were waiting, tipped off by Phil McGiollabhain who had gotten wind of the impending visit.
That was the moment the Wee Tax Case became toxic for the SFA.
The questions started almost immediately.
Only the Bampots were asking them because the media as a whole didn’t want to know. They still don’t. Throughout the years in which this issue has been “current” the mainstream press has never asked the questions the bloggers have been. Any hope that they might do so in the future is forlorn.
If they were going to do it, they’d have been doing it from that visit.
By December the Bampots were pressuring the SFA around the clock.
Stewart Regan took the ill-considered decision to comment on the matter on Twitter, and that sparked a real honest-to-God panic at Ibrox and Hampden.
Regan expected media attention at that point.
That’s why he sent a series of emails to Andrew Dickson and Ally Russell at Ibrox, suggesting a “line to take.”
But Rangers weren’t happy with that line. They thought it would raise more questions, and suspicions, than it would provide answers.
The two organisations had a nice wee email exchange to clarify the matter.
It culminated with a nice wee dinner meeting.
At that dinner meeting, of course, this issue was a minor matter compared to what Whyte told them about the financial state of the club and what his plans were.
He had already shared that information with Neil Doncaster.
What became known as Project Charlotte, the dumping of all the clubs debts via an administration event, was well underway.
In Conclusion
Campbell Ogilvie set up the EBT scheme in question in 1999.
It was made illegal four years later.
He was SFA Vice President at the time and would have been well aware that the club was facing problems over this issue.
From 2010 he knew the bill was on its way, because of the Aberdeen Asset Management case.
He would have known Rangers’ strategy was to conceal the scheme, and he knew that because they were already concealing it from the SFA.
He would also have seen Andrew Thornhill’s legal advice.
The bill was sent, and it went public in April’s accounts.
The UEFA licensing decision was due at the end of May. He had a responsibility under the regulations to find out whether that bill was still unpaid come that deadline. Whether Rangers lied (which some allege) or he just didn’t bother to look is pretty much moot at this point.
He gave UEFA incomplete or misleading information, and the license was granted in spite of sheriff officers visiting the club days later.
When the scandal blew up and the first questions were asked he was the SFA’s point man in negotiating the “line to take” alongside Stewart Regan.
No other club would have got this “special treatment”, but then no other club was so powerfully connected to the movers and shakers in the game.
This issue is one of corruption.
When you look at the timeline and the supporting documents it’s clear that Ogilvie and Regan knew this was dodgy. It’s not that they ignored evidence, it’s that they knew enough not to ask certain questions or for certain information.
They knew what they didn’t want to know, and so it was easy to achieve their goal.
We know too that they were fully aware, by December, that the club was going into administration.
Along with Neil Doncaster at the SPL, they knew debts were going to be dumped.
They knew creditors were going to be screwed and Scottish football’s reputation trashed.
What else have they been involved in over the years?
What discussions has King had with them that we don’t know about?
What else is being hidden from our view?
This has disenfranchised the whole game, and what I’ve just published here is a fraction of the available evidence which is out there and which the Requisitioners have in their hands.
Much of it has been made available to the press, who are, of course, ignoring it.
I don’t expect us to get success on this issue, but right now we have more leverage than we’re ever going to get because season ticket renewals are about to be sent out and the club knows this is a red line issue for a lot of the supporters.
One last push then, guys.
One last effort at getting our club to take this matter to the wire.
So get emailing and writing to Celtic.
Share this article and all the others that are out there.
Drum up the support the Requisitioners need, before this one dies on the vine.
It comes, of course, as Sevco gets ready to contest a Scottish Cup Final with European football a possibility although there are, again, issues over whether the SFA can grant them a license for it. Celtic will play a role in that decision too, with Lawwell on the SFA board.
This is the last chance we’re going to get on this one.
Please make sure we don’t waste it.