The Craig Whyte court case gets better and better and better. Today Donald McIntyre gave us a glimpse of the real scandal, the real setup, the real scam and not surprisingly the picture that’s starting to emerge is one where Craig Whyte wasn’t the only one who was at it.
Those of us who’ve studied these matters have long suspected that Whyte was made the patsy, that the club was on the ropes, and today Donald McIntyre laid it all out for us, and I expect this ground to be covered again and again and again over the next few weeks.
For one thing, Dave King will take the stand and turn the flamethrower on the man who talked him out of £20 million. Other club executives will have to admit, under oath, that the club was a disaster area before Whyte showed up.
I have an intuition about where Donald Findlay is going here; remember what it is that Whyte is on trial for. It’s not for running the club into the ground. If I’m guessing correctly the sparks are going to fly. This is going to be bloody. It’ll scorch the Earth before it’s done.
The picture today’s testimony painted was of a club teetering on the brink.
The media is spinning it to make it seem as if the big tax case was hurting them but although HMRC had made that demand the club was engaged in a multi-stage appeal which, as we’ve seen, might even have been ongoing to the present day. It would not have closed their doors.
The real problem was the unsustainable level of spending, which even with European football still had the potential to run up crippling debts. The banks which had funded Rangers throughout the so-called “glory years” were no longer willing to play ball.
As the board minutes of early 2011 show, the club was almost on its knees. Administration was being discussed openly. McIntyre wanted a financial trouble-shooter on the board to make sure they weren’t trading whilst insolvent. A lot of us were speculating about that at the time.
What’s apparent from today is that Murray knew he was handing Whyte a time-bomb primed to go off.
McIntyre, under oath, told the court that he was concealing as much as the “Motherwell Born Billionaire”; he instructed the board to hide as much from Whyte as he could. “They weren’t putting information in the data room,” McIntyre said.
And what sort of information was being with-held from Whyte?
The true scale of the tax liability for a start.
Correspondence between the club and the banks.
No three year cash flow forecasts.
No details of executive salaries … and I’m sure there was more.
Findlay seemed shocked by this. “This is the takeover of a major business,” he said to McIntyre at one point. “That couldn’t be right.”
It certainly couldn’t, but it’s exactly what went down.
It makes you wonder what else they were concealing, and from who.
On top of this, McIntyre confirms that the board had “no defence” against the Discounted Options Scheme – the Wee Tax Case – which HMRC had already presented the club with a bill for. Because of the use of side-letters, which the Revenue service had in their possession, and which the club had initially attempted to conceal, there was no doubt whatsoever inside Ibrox that this was something that needed to be done.
McIntyre admits that there were measures the club could have taken to mitigate the potential impact of these things, such as cutting costs for the playing squad or selling off assets. They chose not to do so, to put football success ahead of meeting their obligations. They knew the long-term consequences would be catastrophic; this was all about short-term gains at the risk of serious, serious damage being done somewhere down the line.
It’s apparent from all this that the club didn’t meet any of the criteria for a European football license the following year. I think it’s highly questionable whether they should have had one in 2009-10 or 2010-11 either. Whatever projections they submitted to the SFA and UEFA must have been miles off from the reality the club was facing.
All of this can be definitively laid at one door; that of David Murray, chairman of the club and peer of the realm.
Today, in court, he was left without a name.
And we’ve not heard half of it yet.
As ever, thanks to James Doleman. Another outstanding effort.