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.