Tonight, Twitter users who’ve been following the saga of the Offshore Game and its damning report into the practices of the SFA were treated to two quite unbelievable and contradictory tweets on the subject from the BBC’s Kenny MacIntyre.
First he tried to say that the matter couldn’t be covered because there were “legalities” surrounding it.
Aaaah that old standby. That old cobblers. That old bullshit.
Then he came up with the gem at the top of the piece, which The Clumpany has rightly nominated for Tweet of The Century.
It probably won’t win.
These people always manage to trump you when you think they’ve hit Absolute Bottom.
The single biggest issue in Scottish football at the moment, perhaps ever; an outside agency with enough credibility to clear front pages from national newspapers and change laws when it writes about the politics of finance, who wrote a report claiming the SFA aren’t capable, or trustworthy enough, to run the game they’re charged with … isn’t important enough to discuss? On a show who’s content tackles such burning issues as “your favourite Old Firm goal.”
What a shame we can’t fold this report into an anecdote about a time we met John Brown lying outside a boozer.
They’d almost have to talk about it then, right?
You can imagine the response that suggestion got.
As a license payer with a media degree, it actually embarrasses me to read those tweets from someone working for the national broadcaster.
Why doesn’t it embarrass him to write them?
For the record, even as he was sending those out his own organisation was running a story on its main news page quoting the Tax Justice Network and citing a report they published over the weekend. But that one probably didn’t have to concern itself with “legalities.”
It was only about trillions of dollars being transferred out of Russia, China and other “developing countries”, and into offshore bank accounts in tax shelters.
Nothing controversial about that, eah?
So, I dunno … maybe it’s just me, but on the one hand you have an article which appears to suggest that potentially dangerous groups of people – everyone from the Russian Mafia to rogue Chinese generals – are moving nine or ten digit sums of money into slush funds … and on the other you have a story that calls Campbell Ogilvie a liar … and it’s the latter that your legal team is absolutely pissing its pants over.
Why do I find that profoundly funny?
Here’s the news, Kenny; Campbell Ogilvie is a liar.
It’s a demonstrable fact that he lied to the Lord Nimmo Smith commission and, repeatedly, to you and your media colleagues. I can write that without fear of contradiction because I actually researched it and it’s there, in black and white, in the Nimmo Smith report itself. He said he had no role in the running of the EBT scheme when, actually, his is the first signature on the first piece of paperwork that put it in place.
I just finished a lengthy piece for On Fields of Green on exactly this subject; the gutless attitude of our press.
I never expected such a sterling example to present itself to us all from the BBC itself. Their colleagues in England must be thunderstruck at the glib way they’ve passed over an issue of this gravity and magnitude, involving the very subject they’re meant to cover.
Institutional failure?
Simple spinelessness from individual hacks?
Does it even matter anymore?
Just when you think you couldn’t hold them in greater contempt …
To read the On Fields of Green article click here.