As predicted the announcement yesterday from CQN and the Resolution 12 guys provoked a firestorm of interest and attention, and it’s only going to get more acute over the next 24 hours as people have time to digest and dissect what was in their statement.
Here on this blog I did the same yesterday and that, too, has generated quite the response. Much of it from trolls, some of it from people who started out trying to make serious conversations and in the end simply started throwing around accusations.
The information the Resolution 12 guys put in the public domain yesterday is but a fraction of that which they possess overall.
There are issues regarding some of it that are legal, some that are wholly irrelevant to their case (as, by the way, was UEFA’s confirmation that Rangers and Sevco are two separate entities; that was important in coming to an understanding of why no punishment was handed down over the central issue, but is in itself not really relevant) and some of which haven’t been disclosed because they are the subject of further discussions and enquiries.
The Resolution 12 team has the sole right to disclose that information.
I’ve neither got it nor want it. It’s up to them entirely when – even if – that information ever sees the light of day. Those who have demanded the publication of the famous letter ought to consider that there are good reasons why it wasn’t published on the day they were sent it.
These guys aren’t playing a game here; they’re not doing this for publicity or fame, unlike some of their detractors. This is an important task for them, and they are handling it in the correct way, a way which secures the answers they are looking for.
A few of the issues I raised yesterday are being challenged.
First, I’m going to say that anything I get wrong ought not to be blamed on the Resolution 12 team.
They posted their information. I interpreted that information.
If there’s a factual error on my part their own case doesn’t weaken as a result – and people should remember that. I do make mistakes on this blog. I made a big one the other day with the transfer window date, but I hope you’ll excuse me for those little lapses which are a result of having ten thousand different jobs to do and not enough hours in the day.
Too much coffee on top of that, and it’s a wonder I can write in complete sentences.
For the record, let me state that I’m very comfortable with what I published yesterday. Having reviewed it several times there’s only one area where I might want to clarify things … but I’ll do that in another blog at another time and it has no bearing on the main point.
One of the places where I’ve allegedly “got it wrong” is in my assertion that the license would have been revoked during the season and the club thrown out of a competition that they were in. Those who’ve made this assertion are basing it on their same tired old argument about how “tax liabilities payable” was the issue here and that other clubs had such liabilities payable and were allowed to play in Europe blah blah blah … and all of it is nonsense.
For openers, nobody, at any time, on the Resolution 12 team has ever suggested that the mere fact of having “tax liabilities payable” was, in and of itself, a reason why a club would not have been granted a license. This is a deliberate and sneaky misrepresentation of the actual issue here.
Clubs have been given licenses with liabilities payable, but in each case they would have had to satisfy UEFA that those liabilities were in the process of being met and that agreements to that effect were in place and the process being undertaken.
If you owe ten thousand pounds to the bank they don’t send the bailiffs to your door unless, for some reason, you either refuse to pay or simply stop paying. At that point a liability becomes not simply existent but overdue. UEFA concerns itself with those very cases, and their licensing regulations are based on those.
The issue at play here is what the SFA knew when Rangers offered their assurances about their own “tax liabilities payable” in June 2011. The SFA granted a license on the basis of Rangers assurances in the first place. The Resolution 12 guys rightly focus on when this bill “crystallised” because it’s important to know at which precise point it went from being a “liability payable” to being overdue, and this forms one of the key questions that is still to be answered.
But there’s another classic misunderstanding – or misrepresentation – over what I published last night in the section that deals with UEFA’s “verdict” on Rangers. I did not say Rangers would have been kicked out of Europe or punished for having an “overdue payable” any more than the Resolution 12 guys has ever suggested such a thing.
I believe that the issue here is that Rangers lied.
That they wilfully and blatantly lied. Stewart Regan’s statement which drew a very clear line between where he felt the Associations’ responsibilities ended and theirs began seemed to me, and others, to be his way of distancing the SFA from that lie, and I wrote that at the time in the article where I said he’d “thrown Rangers to the wolves.”
Now it may well be that a club would not have been kicked out of Europe automatically for deliberately lying to UEFA on an official return, for wilfully misrepresenting itself on a licensing document, but I can’t actually think of an offence they’d have taken more seriously short of the “one strike and you’re out” sort like match-fixing and doping.
Over the course of that season this matter went from being about a tax liability to being about deliberate concealment and deception, and those are matters serious enough that they carry with them enormous game-changing consequences.
I believe I made that pretty clear last night, but if I didn’t I’m glad to do so now.
There are those who will gasp at me making such an allegation.
They really are a confused and contradictory bunch, aren’t they?
Because what they’re doing, in essence, is saying that their club would never have done such a thing.
That their club would never have been so reckless.
That it would never have let itself get into such a fix.
But consider who their club was being run by at the time.
We know for a fact that he was precisely the sort of man who might have done such a thing.
Who might have been so reckless.
Who might have allowed them to get into such trouble.
The second he put them into administration he disqualified them from Europe the following season anyway.
He had already decided that he wouldn’t put any bills, of any consequence, during the remainder months of his time at the club.
Publicly available information tells us what he was, what he did, even what he might have planned. We even know, thanks to the public availability of stuff like the Project Charlotte documents exactly the schedule by which he might have done it.
This guy’s MO was explained, on national TV, by one of his closest associates.
The very people telling us their club would never have lied to UEFA, would never have put the SFA in this impossible position, they’re the very same people who wail over and over and over again that the club itself, and they in turn, were the innocent victims of an unscrupulous man. I think that oversimplifies things enormously, and it lets a lot of people off from their own culpability and responsibility, but it does contain a core of truth in it.
This guy did what he pleased and at best was utterly heedless of the consequences to the club he was running, as he was heedless of the consequences time and time again in his prior business history, because his sole intention was to do what was right for him and sod everyone else and all the collateral damage that went with that.
When these people say “Rangers would never have done that” they aren’t stepping up for their club in the way they think they are; they aren’t saying “Rangers would never have done this” at all. They are saying “he would never have done this.”
They are vouching for the probity and decency and moral standing of a guy who’s name they can’t speak without a curse.
And in that lies the weakness of their argument.
There’s a lot still to be done on Resolution 12. I can’t say that enough times. The stuff that’s in the public domain right now is a fraction of what these guys have in their possession, and I won’t lie to you by saying it’ll all see the light of day; some of it never will.
But trust in their good intentions and their desire to get to the truth, because that is what is ultimately important here and they are doing a damned good job.
The Resolution 12 guys have gotten their hands on some more t-shirts and you can purchase one by clicking on the link below.
They deserve nothing less. They earned it.
