Donald Findlay has begun his summation in the trial of Craig Whyte and he’s made it abundantly clear that he believes his client was “set up” to take the fall at a club that was already on its knees before he walked through the door.
Findlay has gotten right to the heart of it here, and said what many of us had been for years, only to be told that it was nonsense; from the minute the crash in 2008 came, eradicating the ability of the Bank of Scotland to keep on funding the madness, they were living on borrowed time. Administration – at the very least – was as good as certain. It became inevitable when Ally McCoist led his side to successive European defeats within a month, causing the entire club to go into financial free-fall.
Findlay doesn’t focus on the aftermath of Craig Whyte’s takeover; as he has stated clearly, the administration of Rangers is not what Craig Whyte was charged with. He is charged in relation to the takeover itself, and whether or not it took place without Murray and others knowing where the cash came from. Specifically, it alleges that Whyte committed fraud by attempting to conceal that some of it had come from an agreement with Ticketus.
Findlay contends that this is nonsense.
He claims that no-one in the Murray camp was interested in where the money was coming from. He suggests that some of them knew full well and just didn’t care. “The deal was more important than the details” is how he put it today. Murray and his people wanted to close this. They didn’t care how it was being done.
That club lived beyond its means for over a decade before the roof came in. In 2008 the financial crash almost broke Bank of Scotland. They were bought over by Lloyds, in a deal that was later the subject of an SFO investigation. Lloyds hadn’t realised what a basket case they’d taken over; the hole in the balance sheet was enormous. They immediately put their own man on the Rangers board and told him to start making cuts, something that fiercely resisted by many at the club, who actually suggested that the bank should simply write off the debt.
Fantasy stuff. It was never going to happen.
Much has been made of how they “reduced debts” in the three years after the bank stopped letting them spend. They had no choice. But they still paid big transfer fees, they still paid wages far above what was safe, they still allowed Smith to grump and moan and stand in the way of genuine reforms which might even have fortified them from the tax case.
Smith knew there was a bad time coming. He couldn’t wait to cut and run, leaving McCoist holding the bag. Murray was in as big a hurry to be done with it; he knew Smith wasn’t hanging about and probably sensed that McCoist would be a disaster. If he’d waited just another couple of months to do the deal his own hands would have been on the wheel when the crash came.
These people couldn’t wait to find a mug to dump it all on.
Whyte had his own plans, of course, and was happy to play the patsy. Because he believed he could steer his way through the wreckage and come out with a debt free club on the other side. But once HMRC dug in their heels, making liquidation certain, and the clubs refused the NewCo passage to the SPL the ball was up on the slates and the game was over. Charles Green, the guy who he hand-picked for the job, then shafted him out of the assets.
This whole saga has a ways to run yet, but Whyte’s courtroom drama is almost at end as far as the takeover itself goes. Nobody has clean hands here, but he might yet walk away with wrists free of the handcuffs many folk were calling for.
He knew what he was doing, but the evidence suggests others were equally aware of what they were doing too.
It’s almost in the hands of the jury.