In our lives, every single one of us has, at some point, had to face up to uncomfortable truths.
Whether it’s in your personal life, or the job you do or want to, whether it’s in relation to ambitions or intentions, whatever it might be, all of us have done it. All of us have had to recalibrate our view of the world and our place in it, and face up to some facts.
It’s not easy to do sometimes.
Those realisations don’t exactly fill the house with flowers, unless they are of the sympathy kind. Even arriving at them requires a walk through the darkness; it’s no wonder a lot of folk try to ignore this stuff as long as they can, clinging to whatever shred of hope they have that things are other than they are.
Sevco fans have been doing this a long time, since their club was born amidst the ruins of the old Ibrox operation, since the End of Rangers. Today, in light of the Craig Whyte verdict, they are especially vocal. And they are blaming Scottish society for the fact they can’t get “justice.”
I’m amazed the majority of them can even spell the word.
I am tired of these clowns playing the Victim Card. They weren’t the victims here, no matter what their fevered imaginations can conjure up. The victims were the hundreds of creditors who were left in the lurch when the club went under. The victims were the teams which were cheated over a decade by their former football club. They might as well have paid their players out of brown paper bags, with the proceeds of a heist.
Murray said in court that he had turned down several offers for the club, because one didn’t have the necessary cash – neither did Whyte – and another because of links to “organised crime.” I don’t know why he bothered as he had a guy on the board at the time – the very one who’s chairman right now – who was facing charges on multiple fronts including bribery, fraud, forging documents, money laundering, tax evasion and a whole gamut of stuff which, in the United States, would have seen him and his compadres arrested under racketeering statutes.
In my opinion, King’s “investment” in Rangers was money laundering, pure and simple, and if I’m correct then apart from presiding over a tax scam in the UK, Murray was also helping to assist one in South Africa. The club’s corrupting of the SFA still lives with us today. They were trading whilst technically insolvent for years. The bank that was allowing it ended up the subject of the largest corporate fraud case in the history of the country.
All of us are rightly sick of being told to move on from this, that there’s nothing to see, whilst King and his current board are financially doping the NewCo and may yet crash the company and walk away, just as Craig Whyte did.
And if what Whyte did in his takeover of Rangers was prosecutable in the first place, then why the Hell isn’t King himself awaiting trial for a variety of charges wholly separate from The Takeover Panel’s case against him, for manipulation of stock, tortious interference and more? Because his takeover of Sevco was about as corrupt as it’s possible to be and he was cheered through the doors by the same fans who are wallowing in pity tonight.
To make it all even harder to stomach for the average football fan who’s sick and tired of Sevco fans and their victimhood and all its whining, up popped Stewart Regan tonight, and God knows where he was dragged out of, as he’s been invisible for well over a month now since the grotesque behaviour of the Sevco support about which he has not uttered one single word.
I’m watching the 5-1 game at Ibrox as I write this; we’ve just scored the fourth goal and Leigh Griffiths is holding a battery the size of a golf ball that someone in the crowd threw at him or one of his fellow Celtic players. Regan has not been heard from on that issue, or any of the others that surround the game.
I know for a fact that the anti-racism charity Show Racism The Red Card asked the SFA for an explanation about their complete failure to comment on the disgusting treatment to which Scott Sinclair was subject … and I also know they’ve still not responded.
His interview with Chris McLaughlin of the BBC was an exercise in time-wasting; before I watched it I had been looking up whether or not it was safe to re-heat rice. I got far more out of that exercise than I did watching the man McLaughlin alleges is the head of our national sport; Regan is a pathetic excuse for an administrator and in no way a leader.
Too much of Scottish football cries the blues for these people.
Why do you think that when Rangers was available to buy in the first place that it was only the fraudsters and gangsters and wide-boys who were queueing up to buy it?
Because it was so well, so legitimately, run?
Because it was populated by people who were prepared to scrutinise everything that was done?
Of course not.
It was a football club run by one man, presided over by a board that was full of sycophants and self-interested charlatans, it was up to all sorts, had much of officialdom keeping the peek on its behalf and because it was followed by gullible supporters whose moto was “ask no questions and enjoy it while you can.”
And the end was always in the post.
The Sevco fans can cry for justice all they like; we know their version of it looks grossly different to that which the rest of us want. And whilst today Craig Whyte walked out of court a free man, a man who history will judge far less harshly than it will the likes of Johnson (back on an Ibrox board! Who’s next? Charles Green?) and Murray, there are a lot of us who’re watching events carefully and in anticipation of some justice of our own.