Today, we had some illuminating moments during the Craig Whyte trial, which is proving to be everything we expected it to be, in revealing some of the nutty goings on at the club during the years prior to Whyte’s takeover and through the rollercoaster twelve months when he was in charge.
Yes, it’s been quite an eye-opener already.
There were two main witnesses today, and they were both on the witness list which was available online during the week and which I wrote about earlier in the day. I had known Smith was appearing – I was writing it during his testimony – but I had not expected McCoist to follow so quickly.
The prosecution is playing its weaker cards early.
Just one thing before I proceed to the point of the piece; consider, with a smile, Ally McCoist’s description of his current occupation as a “football analyst.”
That one made me laugh.
If you turned on the TV and he was there, offering an “expert opinion” on what you were about to watch you’d switch off and run to the bookies and bet against everything he said.
This is the man, after all, who gave Kevin Kyle a bumper one year deal with a salary worth thousands of pounds a week to play in Scotland’s lowest league and then watched as he played a mere eleven games and scored a paltry three goals.
Today, his testimony was pretty uninteresting compared to that of Smith, who admitted that he knew of the EBT issue “by March 2011”.
Everyone knows that story was in the public domain well ahead of that date. This is interesting in itself; Smith is trying to divert attention from his own failure to drastically cut costs and to ward off questions about whether he was the recipient of an EBT. At the same time, he offered an incredibly insightful look at what was going on inside Ibrox even as the bank was tightening the belts of all involved and the EBT monster loomed in the background like a mugger in an alley.
In my view, Smith came very close to perjuring himself today.
Findlay was discussing a board meeting which took place in 2011, and asked him if he knew the club’s financial situation was bad at that point. Smith said “not exactly.” He was then asked about Donald Muir, the Lloyds TSB rep who was serving on the Rangers board at the time.
According to James Doleman, “Smith said he was aware the bank had placed a person on the board … “ Which Smith then contradicted by admitting he was aware that “a Donald Muir was on the board but had no idea who had appointed him.”
Which to me is kind of funny, because Smith knew exactly who Donald Muir was two years before that meeting took place, and he damned well knew exactly who had appointed Muir to the board, because he told the media that at the time.
“As far as I’m concerned the bank is running Rangers,” he told the press in October 2009. “Sir David has stepped down and a representative of the bank has been placed on the board. It’s not a situation anybody wants the club to be in.”
This wasn’t the only thing he said that raised eyebrows.
Findlay grilled him pretty hard on his own role in the collapse of the club; this is where I have to give credit to the QC.
He might be a well-known Rangers man, but he was never going to be gentle here, in pursuit of a positive verdict for his client.
He suggested that Smith should have started cutting the playing budget – something every single Celtic blog has been suggesting these past six years.
Smith wasn’t interested in that, deciding to “point out the consequences of that action”, which James Doleman has correctly characterised as Smith putting success on the field ahead of the club’s general well-being.
Findlay wasn’t having that, and he pointed to the calamity that befell Leeds United when they overspent and collapsed into ruinous debts.
Incredibly – and with the corpse of Rangers twitching in his shadow – Smith refused to accept that football clubs ought not to do that …
“They had successful seasons …” he said of the Elland Road club, who’s four years of “success” under O’Leary saw them win not one trophy.
They crashed three divisions in the years that followed and are no nearer a return to the Premier League than they were after they managed to claw their way back into the Championship seven years ago.
It’s been nearly 15 years since those “glory days.” Leeds are still in peril as a consequence of them. They might never fully recover their place in English football. Ask their legions of loyal fans how they feel about that era Smith described so flippantly. I am willing to bet they would not define it as “successful” by any standard we currently recognise.
All of this is to say nothing for the quite jaw-droppin g moment when Smith was asked about the club’s “tremendous financial burden” and blamed it on the bank!
“(They) allow it to happen …” he said.
But there was an even more surreal moment, and it came when Findlay pressed Smith on what he had told the Rangers board he required for transfer fees, even as a financial crisis he was well aware of – including the £80 million EBT tax bill – pressed on them from every side. The board meeting minutes chart the mind-bending figure Smith was asking for.
It was a staggering £18 million.
“Where was that money coming from?” Findlay asked him, doubtless not quite able to believe what he was hearing with his own ears.
Smith told Findlay it was not his job to ask that; it “was his job to tell the board what was needed to perform at the highest level or face the consequences.”
The real consequences were those that attitude brought home to roost on 14 February 2012.
Neither Smith nor McCoist nor others inside Ibrox have learned a damned thing from that. Smith, to this day, believes he was right and everyone else was wrong. Foremost in the Blame Game, he and others still hold Lloyds accountable; Smith had a dig at them, back in 2009, when he said, without a trace of self-awareness at all, “They are only looking at it from a short-term perspective … Of course the ironic aspect, not just for Rangers but for everybody, is that the banks are telling us what we can and can’t do. Maybe someone should have done that with them a long time before they started.”
Of course he’s right.
But if the banks had actually been regulated properly, and run sustainably, in the beginning Murray would never have been able to spend what he did on the club and there would have been no Rangers nine in a row. Smith clearly has no grasp of these concepts whatsoever.
The real irony here is that Lloyds, until they bought HBOS and their toxic balance sheet – Rangers included – had been run right … and continued to be.
They simply did what they had to do in the aftermath to clear up the almighty mess Murray and his mates, including Smith, had caused.
Many thanks, as ever, to James Doleman for his invaluable work in the courtroom.