Slowly but surely it’s all coming out. At last.
The Craig Whyte trial has only seen a couple of days of solid courtroom testimony, but already they have been explosive. Yesterday, Donald McIntyre, their former finance director, laid some more landmines when he told the court that, yes, health and safety officers forced repairs on the club, that bits of Ibrox were “falling to bits” and that the Wee Tax Bill was known about and acknowledged months before Whyte even took over.
There is plenty in those revelations alone to whet the appetite on, without us even discussing the McCoist “contract guarantee” which effectively meant he was guaranteed the job on Smith’s departure, or the one about Murray not directly owning any Rangers shares, which kind of raises the question as to how he was personally able to hand Whyte the club.
All of this is fascinating. It gives us a peek at the most dysfunctional football club in Europe at the time. Not that Ibrox has had any better luck recently.
Let’s take the first part. It seems that some repair work was done on Ibrox during the Whyte tenure, which kind of makes King out to be a liar on this issue too.
McIntyre confirmed that the HSE had “forced” repairs on Ibrox … which leads me to surmise that those repairs have been done.
I may be reading it wrong. Whyte’s takeover document does, as I said, reference a £1.8 million “health and safety liability”; we don’t know for a fact that it was ever completed … but McIntyre has hinted that it was. Whyte’s board was supposed to pay the bill for it.
We also don’t know if they ever did.
But what’s crucial here is that whether it was done or not, or whether it was put off and put off, and still might be … it was enforced. This isn’t a decision they took voluntarily. Pressure was applied. It makes you wonder how bad things had got over there that it had to be. Again, this is all shrouded in secrecy. We know, for example, that there was an issue with the kitchens. We know there were wiring problems which saw entire wall panels ripped out.
There’s a lot wrong over there. The roofs are a problem that’s only come to light recently. Other issues have been in the public domain for years; we know, for example, that crucial repairs have been put off for at least a decade because of their proximity to the famed marble staircase and concerns over asbestos … some have estimated that this, alone, would entail a repair bill in excess of £10 million.
The issues that got fixed weren’t necessarily about the roofs. We’ve got a club here that had stopped having any other consideration than maintaining an expensive team. When I say everything else was secondary that’s exactly what I mean. Other issues were tackled only when they became critical. It should not surprise us that basic safety was one of them. It doesn’t surprise me that this is the prevailing attitude at Ibrox today.
Ibrox has been in a shameful state of disrepair for years almost beyond counting. But we can now say definitively that David Murray himself allowed things to become so bad that it was a public health hazard that forced the HSE to take action.
King, of course, was on that board for years, so when he blames other people for failing to sustain maintenance spending he’s actually pointing the finger at himself too, not that he’s ever, for one second, going to admit that.
Which brings us to the latest revelations over the Wee Tax Case. We’ve finally got it, from inside the Blue Room itself, the simple, unshakable fact that the Rangers board was not disputing that this was a bill that simply had to be paid. The only issue was that they were determined to get Whyte himself to pay it as part of the takeover.
We’re creeping towards the final denouement here. The SFA has a case to answer, and they know it and we know it and they know we know it. This is the point where they’ll be watching carefully, and afraid of what people on the witness stand will say.
One thing is for sure; these folk are being questioned under oath.
Nobody is going to sit on that stand and commit perjury to save Stewart Regan.
He must know that too.
Finally, the revelations about McCoist’s contract are the stuff of football writer’s dreams. This is the guy who held himself up as the model Real Rangers Man. Everyone knows what a fraud that was. McCoist was a grasping, greedy person who put himself far in front of everyone and everything else, the club included. The club, in fact, most of all.
They could, at the time, have tried to attract a very decent manager when Smith left. But McCoist had worked himself up an iron clad contract which bound them to giving him the job; a guy who had never managed a game of football in his life. He wasn’t remotely ready for that position and deep down he must have realised it himself. He certainly knew it long before they chased him. Not only did his personal terms bleed them, but he demanded, and got, huge sums of money to build teams massively overpowered for the leagues they were in.
McCoist helped kill Rangers; that’s just a statement of fact. But not satisfied with that, he hung around Sevco like a bad smell and gave them a royal grafting as well. In some ways, this should result in a re-evaluation about him in the eyes of the Celtic fans. He should probably be in the pantheon of legends along with Craig Whyte, guaranteed his very own statue in the Gallowgate. Few people contributed more to the crises over there than he did.
We’re learning a lot here about how things operated at Ibrox; it makes what we already guessed seem tame by comparison. The only amazing thing is that the whole house of cards didn’t come down sooner. It was ripe to fall. Rangers last three titles delayed what was inevitable. Had we secured even one of them there would have been nothing left standing before the world even knew the name Craig Thomas Whyte.
He was guilty, but not responsible.
The historical record will bear that out.
Thanks as ever to James Doleman, who’s contining reports from the courtroom are an invaluable resource.