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Has The Craig Whyte Trial Blown The Roof Off The Ibrox Safety Certificate Issue?

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One of the stories that came to the fore during the week, as the Craig Whyte trial circus rolled into town, is one I expected to have gained wider circulation. Unusually, it wasn’t revealed in the court proceedings themselves, but in Whyte’s official indictment, which can be read online for anyone who is interested.

This indictment itself is not new information; it was originally published in October last year, but it’s only now that some of us are looking, properly, at what’s in there. To be frank, most of us didn’t expect these proceedings to get so far and there wasn’t likely to be anything in the official charge sheet which we didn’t already know.

Or so we thought.

In fact, it’s a pretty interesting document.

Some of the particulars have been beeping on my radar for a few months now, one of them above others.

It was the way the price Whyte paid for the club dropped from the £5 million he initially offered to the £1 for which the deal was finally done. That intrigued me because according to some, Murray agreed to the sale for that price on the understanding that the £5 million would be put to good use inside the club itself.

All told, Whyte gave him assurances to that end.

In fact, they are very helpfully listed in the indictment.

One of the uses for which the money was earmarked was paying off the Discounted Options Scheme tax bill – the Wee Tax Case, the scourge of the SFA and source of the Resolution 12 issue – at a cost of some £2.8 million.

The rest of the money was to be divided between other projects, included giving McCoist some to spend on transfers.

It was a pipedream. All of it.

But there was one item which, like the DOS tax bill, can’t so easily be brushed aside or written off.

It is there, in black and white; a £1.7 million “health and safety liability.”

That almost certainly relates to work that needed done on Ibrox, work on which their license would have depended.

There are no additional details as to what this is; it’s simply there, in the document, left hanging, as if it was nothing at all.

In fact, it might be everything.

We don’t know what that “liability” was, but we know that Whyte did not have £5 million to meet that or other obligations, and from the moment McCoist’s calamitous management saw them crash out of Europe they were haemorrhaging money rapidly, and dangerously.

The chances of them getting through the season were virtually zero; Whyte, in fact, had no intention whatsoever of spending “one thin dime” on satisfying any creditor of note.

From what we’ve been led to believe – and this has been borne out in several documentaries and news reports – Whyte ignored all the bills from day one. He was stuffing them in a drawer or shredding them upon delivery.

We know, for example, from bitter experience, that he did not pay the Wee Tax Case bill; it remains a stain on the SFA to this day, and has the potential to cost people their jobs yet. A lot of us will be listening to every word Craig Whyte says on the stand to find out what the SFA knew and when they knew it.

If he decides to talk there’s nowhere to hide.

He stopped paying PAYE and National Insurance pretty early on, which is what led to the crisis that saw the administrators called in. A man who did that would not have hesitated to ignore any other missive which threatened his plans.

I also strongly suspect that he didn’t fear the consequences of a negative healthy and safety report.

As I said in an earlier piece on this site, politics and not public safety is what will decided issues involving Sevco’s roof and the state of their stadium. There was no prospect of the council voting to close down Ibrox if they could help it, either then or now.

But they are perfectly happy to impose scandalous parking restrictions on Celtic.

As scandalous as it is to say, the council would rather take the risk of something calamitous, even deadly, going wrong at Ibrox than take action to shut the ground, rendering the club homeless and virtually destroying them in the process. No politician in Scotland would wilfully put his or her name to such a thing and Craig Whyte was just the sort of man who would have used that to his full advantage. He never would have written that cheque.

Indeed, we know full well he never did.

We know something else too; none of those who’ve run Sevco were willing to write it either.

How do we know that?

We know that because in one of his few acts of truth-telling since taking over the club Dave King himself let that slip in a Q&A with a supporters organisation before the season got underway. The relevant section can be read on their site, but it reads as follows:

“It is as unfortunate as it is true that Ibrox and its surrounding environs have been sadly neglected for many years – even prior to the Craig Whyte takeover. During the final years of the Murray Group control the bank put the Club’s finances under so much pressure that stadium upkeep was relegated to essentials only ….”

King was trying to cover the club’s back when he talked about upkeep being relegated to “essentials only.”

But the existence of a £1.7 million “health and safety liability” in 2011 reveals that even upkeep on those “essentials” were not being taken terribly seriously.

His statement also makes it pretty clear that none of the work was carried out by Green or the subsequent boards, leaving his own regime holding the bag.

That £1.7 liability was allowed to mature for five years, and from what we can gather the club was granted a certificate year on year regardless.

Do you suppose whatever those problems were that they improved with age?

One would think not.

When Phil McGiollabhain sent his Freedom of Information request to the council a month or so ago they rejected much of it on the grounds that details such as he was seeking could potentially be used to threaten public safety.

Many of us were astounded at that, for any number of reasons.

To refuse to divulge information of a public interest nature on grounds such as these is virtually unheard of. To use public safety as an excuse for concealing a matter concerning itself with that very issue is absolutely incredible.

But it also makes you wonder; if they are worried about an act of sabotage at Ibrox then things are worse than we know.

Even an extraordinarily detailed health and safety report would not contain enough details as to enable your average Joe, though bent on causing wilful destruction, enough information to do serious damage to the ground … unless it is in such a state of disrepair that there are potential perils all around those who sit in it every week.

And if that’s the case then it’s a matter of time before something goes wrong, intentionally or otherwise.

Silence on these matters will no longer suffice; Celtic fans are due at that ground in a week.

We won’t get answers before then, but I personally would not bet my wellbeing on the integrity of that club’s absentee landlord, or on politicians who’ll soon be out of office and therefore immune from any consequences which accrue from their lack of action.

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