There are few issues which irk the Celtic support more than the way our club’s appeared to drag its feet on issues of corporate governance within the Scottish game, with no end in sight and no answers being forthcoming.
This isn’t the fault of the fans; the fans have acted, and in particular those fans who birthed and then ran the campaign to have Resolution 12 taken up by the club.
This subject bores a lot of people, and others don’t get it at all. For those who are still a little in the dark over this (and you’d be surprised how many there are) let me give them a brief run down on what the particulars of Resolution 12 are, and why they are important.
Resolution 12 is so named because it first came to light at a Celtic AGM. It was put forward by a group of supporters who wanted specific questions answered about SFA governance. Now, the issue was never debated at the AGM – Celtic asked that the matter be shelved and they entered into private discussions about it with the fans involved.
The issue related to the season 2011-12, which was to become the most transformative in Scottish football history. It was the season in which Craig Whyte briefly ran Rangers, where the club exited Europe twice in a month and from there plunged downward into a death spiral. Celtic fans had long suspected that the SFA should never have granted them a license to play in Europe that year in the first place; they had a “debt payable” to HMRC at the time – what we now call the Wee Tax Case, the Discounted Options Scheme – and that violated several licensing rules.
Celtic fans were never particularly interested in this issue as to whether or not Rangers had broken the rules; that wasn’t the point. Everyone knew the Whyte regime had been bad news. We also knew that, for years, Murray and his people had been up to everything, and were the ones who’d set up the EBT scam in the first place.
Rangers, as we all know, were capable of anything.
The issue was the SFA, and whether or not they had followed the correct procedures in analysing whether Rangers met the licensing criteria and how they’d gone about finding out. That was important – and still is – for a number of reasons, which shouldn’t need to be explained. The game here is run on a fair, equitable basis or it isn’t. Teams have to follow the rules or they don’t. Either our governing body plays it straight or it plays favourites.
Our shareholders had a right to ask this question; this was a licensing decision with major financial implications for our club. Rangers got the Champions League berth that year; we only have to look at the riches we’ve netted this season to realise how important that was. It was worth anywhere from £15 – £20 million; a decision of that magnitude had to be made with all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and there was a serious question as to whether that was the case.
Shareholders have legal protection in cases like that. Dividends are paid according to profits. The less profit, the less dividend, and whilst I know few Celtic fans actually care about that side of things those legal protections are there, regardless, and the Resolution 12 guys were determined to use them to shine a big light into the workings of the SFA.
Celtic’s managing director, Peter Lawwell, told the requisitioners that he understood their concern, but didn’t want the club to be seen to be playing such a direct role in the inner workings of another team, even a defunct one. This would be valid if that was the point of the resolution; it never was. This was about the inner workings of the governing body, and Celtic have a responsibility to hold them to account and make sure they do things by the book.
Celtic stepped back from this, but told the guys that they would not object if it was pursued independently. They asked, specifically, to see any evidence that emerged and promised to act if the Resolution 12 guys produced “the smoking gun.”
The smoking gun exists, and they have produced it.
Both UEFA and the SFA admit that Rangers had been in breach of licensing regulations at some point during that season; this is a pure and simple fact. UEFA’s statement that no sanctions could be imposed upon the club because they no longer existed made headlines but didn’t get to the heart of the story.
At the heart of the story is the simple fact that the SFA failed us. It failed to properly investigate this issue at the start and has spent every minute since trying to foster the blame onto someone else. They are still insisting that after a certain point it was no longer their responsibility to investigate this but UEFA’s. They have even tried to blame Rangers, for their own lack of scrutiny into that club’s affairs. None of this will wash.
But getting something done about it is a different issue. UEFA have written a letter to the Requisitioners which confirms some of their suspicions. But the European governing body will not take this matter any further unless a request to do so comes from the club itself. That’s the key factor here; the guys have produced the smoking gun. The club now has to act on what they have found, and that’s ever the problem here.
Celtic does not want to do this. On one hand I can understand why; for a start, the media will try to turn it into an issue about Rangers. It never was that in the first place. If we’re running scared of what the media says that’s truly pathetic though. If we’re denying our shareholders their right to know if the game here is straight or not because we’re worried about media pressure then a lot of people at Celtic Park have their goddamned priorities wrong.
Rangers no longer exist; they are as out of the reach of justice as the people who murdered John F Kennedy. But they were never the targets of this inquiry to begin with. Regan and his association are, and not even the media should stand in Celtic’s way of finding out how decisions like this are made, and in whose interests.
Some say Celtic don’t want to rock the boat because they are culpable. Culpable in what? In a plot to deny ourselves a Champions League bounty worth an eight figure sum? The more paranoid think we backed off from doing something that would have put Rangers in the grave; that, too, is arrant nonsense. As many of us knew at the time – and as Celtic were certainly aware – that grave had been waiting for them for many years and it was inevitable they’d wind up in it. It was a matter of time, and Celtic could not have prevented it even if they’d wanted to.
The truth is, I don’t know what Celtic’s reluctance is or where it springs from and I don’t particularly care. Scottish football governance remains a shambles and there’s very little sign from Celtic Park that we’re committed to changing that. Somebody has to. Aberdeen are known to be in favour of financial fair play; they put it in their accounts this year, having voluntarily complied with UEFA’s standard. Celtic have been in compliance with that for years but the phrase has never been uttered from the boardroom at Parkhead.
That has to change. These rules are essential for the well-being of Scottish football.
If Sevco, surviving on soft loans and running up debts, wins a European place this season and is granted a license for it without a business plan for breaking even, we’re back in the dark ages here when clubs could do what they liked and spend their way towards oblivion.
This is why Resolution 12 was, and is, massively important; the rules are supposed to be for everyone, and they are supposed to provide a framework for the betterment of the whole sport. Rangers was allowed to do what it liked, spending what it didn’t have, running up debts, hiding its financial problems, and that almost wrecked the game here.
For Celtic to fail to hold the SFA to account on fundamental issues like this is a dis-service to the whole of the sport, but to our shareholders most of all, and the board of directors has a legal, fiduciary duty to those shareholders to protect their interests and to make sure that their investment in the club – both financial and emotional – is not jeopardised by outside agencies making up the rules as they go along.
If Celtic won’t hold the SFA to account then the shareholders must hold the club to account; it’s that simple. And it goes beyond us, to the greater Scottish game, because if fans at other clubs see that ours are making a stand they will make theirs.
The AGM is coming up; it’s next week. If you have shares and a chance to go, you should. No, you must. Make yourselves heard, or delegate someone who will. Fans don’t win votes at these things, but they can get their point across and that matters. God knows our media will cover it; that’s not always bad. I don’t think questioning people and holding them to account is the same as being divisive. Our club has never been so united.
But there are things that have to be done and this is one of them. The Resolution 12 guys have done monumental work, and the support they’ve had from this Family has been astonishing and humbling for them all; I’m sure they wouldn’t object to my saying so.
The club made a commitment to those guys, that they would pursue this matter if presented with the evidence. I’ve seen the evidence, and many of you have too. It is compelling, almost overwhelming. I am in no doubt that Rangers failed to qualify for a European license that year and I’m in no doubt that the SFA was fully aware of that fact at a stage where they could have rejected the club’s application for one.
It is not enough for the SFA to say that without that license the club would have gone under; it is not their job to protect individual clubs from their own reckless behaviour. It is their responsibility to protect the rest of us from it. There is ample evidence, in fact, that they knew Rangers would go under very soon after the European defeats, and didn’t warn the rest of the clubs about that until it was much too late and new TV deals had been negotiated on the quiet.
How much we let these people get away with depends on how hard we push Celtic to give them the proper level of scrutiny.
This coming week, we can do exactly that.