Today the Supreme Court has found Rangers guilty of defrauding the Exchequer for a decade. The costs to the tax man are substantial. The costs to the public purse are enormous. I will detail them in a moment, but first and foremost we have to consider this a crime against football, and it was.

The size of this is incredible.

The scale of the suffering other clubs endured as a consequence is virtually incalculable; Celtic alone lost tens of millions at a conservative estimate. Our club was able to thrive in spite of this; we cannot imagine the cuts that had to be made elsewhere, the teams who had to be dismantled, the players who clubs had to let go early, the fans who were denied a chance to see their teams in Europe and in major finals … it can only be guessed at.

Because of this, the hammer cannot fall just on those who benefited financially.

This crime hurt football clubs and it was done to win trophies and keep alive the illusion that Rangers was a club able to sustain its aggressive policies. Those policies were illegitimate. They were cheating. As such, the consequences within football must fall accordingly.

Rangers won 14 trophies during the EBT years, including five league titles.

All of those trophies should be stricken from the record, or what is our sport about? Every major honour of that time is tainted by this verdict; that taint is not on Rangers but on Scottish football itself, and until that is rectified it will continue to damage the sport.

This article will set out the scale of what Rangers did and why it has to be punished.

It will argue that only a punishment within football will do. It will examine the consequences of what Rangers did, for the game here. And it will review the LNS verdict and make a case for why that has to be immediately set aside, and a new tribunal established.

This is the story of how Rangers’ EBT use nearly wrecked the game … and why what happens next is of vital importance to us all.

The Social Consequences Of What Happened Here

David Murray was using EBT’s in his own companies before he used them at Ibrox, but it’s hard to believe the wider Murray empire sucked as much money out of the public purse as it did at Rangers. The costs to society were enormous. Just putting them into hard numbers doesn’t tell the story. You have to dig down deep, into what those numbers represent, in order to get a complete picture and properly count the cost of it.

Rangers total tax bill, when they collapsed, was £92 million.

Someone created a pie-chart, at the time, which revealed exactly how that broke down, into each individual sector of the economy. I went even further, and examined what it meant within those sectors, and how many public services were impacted and what the consequences were.

Let’s start with pensions. Their take of that money could have paid the state pensions of nearly 3000 people. It would have given nearly 7000 an extra £50 on their Winter Fuel payment; the difference between life and death for many of them.

Losses to the NHS would have equalled nearly £16 million. That money would have hired 160 of the best consultants in the world. It could have paid for 200 GP’s. It would have given the Health Service an extra 230 specialist doctors … or 700 new trainees.

The share for welfare would have bought us 900 support workers.

The share for schools would have got us 360 Early Years teachers. It would have paid for 260 educational psychologists. 300 new Higher Education teachers could have been hired. We could have afforded to give over an amazing 38,000 children their own in-class IPad, and given them the high-tech tools for the digital age. If that doesn’t float your boat, it could have bought one hell of a lot of £50 textbook packs … more than 240,000 of them.

Since their club cares so much about “supporting the troops” let’s look at what the share of that pie allocated to defence spending would have bought; that’s £6,500,000. That would have bought 6500 soldiers a full set of high grade body armour … the sort that saves lives.

If we split the share allocated to police and firefighting evenly between these two crucial, undermanned, services we could have put an extra 65 cops on the beat and 85 more life-saving firemen. We don’t need to look too far back to see how important that might have been, and how vital it might be in the future.

A chunk of that pie was allocated to transport; we could have given 1400 annual zone-cards to people who have made an outstanding contribution to the public sphere.

And all of this would have left us with money left over … a huge sum of money at that, £20 million.

And with that money we could have really have done some stuff. Take your favourite four causes from the above and give those sectors an extra £5 million apiece. Or spend the whole £20 million on something that takes your fancy.

If you don’t like the idea of spreading that £96 million so thinly, you could spend it all on one go, on a major national project … and there are many deserving candidates.

It would have fully funded three years of the old Future Jobs Fund. It could have funded Sure Start Scotland for a year. The legacy costs of the ridiculous PFI project could have been reduced by a staggering 40%. Instead of hiring 85 fireman, try 4400. Or how about spending it putting an extra 1000 police on the payroll, as the Scottish Government intends? You could have done that … five times over.

There are more than 2100 primary schools in Scotland. You could have given the money to them; it would have come out to £43,000 apiece. There are more than 370 secondary schools. You could have given them £250,000 … each. You could have given all of Scotland’s primary school pupils £250 a pop … there are 370,000 of them. There are more than 300,000 in secondary education. They could all have gotten an extra £300.

The National Children’s Music Fund costs £10,000,000 every year. You could have funded that for a decade. The Scottish Government was spending £240,000,000 on its Culture and Sports budget … you could have given that a one-time 40% bump. At a time when housing is a major issue, it’s good that some limited funds have been made available to build hundreds of low cost homes … there could have been thousands instead.

Do not let anyone tell you this is a “just a football story” or that it’s about Celtic fans trying to win a cheap points scoring competition … this was a societal scandal, a disgrace of epic proportions. The cost of this for our communities ought never to be forgotten.

It was necessary to offer this as an overview … our focus is on the football though.

The Consequences To Football

This is a complicated matter, because there are two types of consequences for our national sport of what Rangers did.

One is material, the other is reputational.

Material covers everything from the way it impacted other clubs, to the way they led to the collapse of the club itself and reputational includes both current perception and the way the game here will be viewed through the prism of history and by those who watch it in the future.

The material consequences were enormous, but they are often misunderstood or overlooked.

The entire recent history of Rangers, from the way the club was run with financial aid from Murray’s favourite bankers – those which tried to shut us down for a mere £7 million – to the EBT era itself, was one that did enormous material damage to our sport.

We will never know exactly what Rangers’ cheating in those years cost clubs in terms of lost revenues.

They won titles, when we would have been their closest challengers. We can surmise that the costs to Celtic, in terms of loss Champions League money and such were enormous, but there were costs that trickled down through the game.

Had they not spent that money they would have finished below us in some of those years; that’s pretty clear-cut. Even Alex McLeish, who was a prime beneficiary of what the clubs did in those years, admitted that fact openly, but it’s unlikely they would have finished third or lower without it; the financial gap between them and the rest would clearly have advantaged them, although there is one year that casts that into some doubt.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

But during those years their performances would have certainly had major implications for other sides. Some of those EBT players would have scored crucial goals in massive matches; those matches would have seen teams drop out of the top six. They would have seen some clubs miss out on Europe. They might even have cost some teams a place in the league. The impact of those moments probably plunged some clubs into real trouble.

They won cups during that time. Some of the sides they faced in those competitions lost out on prize money. There were four lower league clubs who played finals against them; that’s no joke to the clubs which did not win those.

One season hints at the possibilities, the one before they brought in Le Guen.

That was the latter stages of the crazy years, the EBT’s were in full swing, but Rangers were floundering. That season, the 2005-06 season, they finished third, a single point behind Hearts. Were there years when, without the EBT’s, they’d have been in similar dire straits?

Possible. All too possible. We’ll never know, nor what those years meant for clubs like Hearts and Aberdeen, who if they’d seen a chance to take second place may have gone for it. The whole of Scottish football might look different.

The duopoly might have been broken.

The damage to the reputation of the game has been worse.

That, as I said, can be measured in two ways, by actual damage and by potential damage.

The EBT years led directly to the collapse of the club. Murray himself maintains that the EBT case was the principal reason the club was unable to find a better buyer than Whyte; this is disingenuous nonsense, of course, because the club had been for sale a couple of years before the story about EBT’s broke into the mainstream, and the only people who had been interested were Russian gangster and a Loyalist politician who never said where the cash was going to come from.

The Murray years overall led to a football spending “arms race” where every club started to spend crazy money. It led to an inflationary cycle which was lethally dangerous. EBT’s came at a time when, even before the crash, Murray’s companies were under pressure to cut spending; they already knew they couldn’t afford for it to go on. EBT’s were one last crazy splurge, one way to keep the gravy train running long after it should have quit.

Rangers were the club with the most influence on the game at the time. They had a compliant media which thought every word that came out of Murray’s mouth was pure gold. Had their club shown sense, had it stopped the insane spending, then other clubs would have sat up and taken notice quick smart. The message it would have sent would have been stark; no club can defy financial gravity for long. That might have put others on the sane road.

Reputationaly, that period damaged the game because it led to the collapse of the club.

That, in turn, led to lies, some of them scandalous beyond belief. Amongst them was the idea that Rangers had been “murdered”, arrant nonsense still being repeated by one of the idiot children of Ibrox last month, as he assumed a seat on the board of the NewCo. He was one of the men who served as club chairman during the EBT years; his lack of humility and his assertion that the rest of Scottish football was to blame for what happened to them is mind-blowing.

The reputational damage that will be done to the game, in the eyes of historians and the next generation of fans, if those years of cheating are allowed to stand is what’s truly awesome to consider.

An entire generation of football fans knows what actually happened here.

Some of us will write books on this period, and they will form part of the record. They will, in fact, be the definitive version of it because they will be the only ones written to reflect Absolute Fact, and that still means something and it always will.

But the next generation of supporters, the ones who are just starting to go to games, perhaps, many of whom are already feeling the financial pinch, will have a choice to make about whether they buy into the rigged nature of football here or not.

To one degree or another, that’s a choice that was never really open to some of us. Think of us as addicts, hooked through the bag; the next generation will be more circumspect and their first view of Scottish football might well be that it’s little more than a cynical joke, a rigged game, and decide not to buy in.

Whether they do or not, football historians will look back on those years as ones in which blatant cheating, perhaps even criminality, were taking place at a major club, and if that club is not punished for it that will stink out the halls of Hampden forever.

Our current “administrators” think this stuff can be wished away; they’ve created a scandal here that is going to go on forever. Clubs will be eternally damned or not depending on how they respond to it. A clear-cut and definitive, independent, investigation has to be launched into what happened in those years, a hands-off inquiry that gets to the bottom of them, and it has to look at the whole EBT affair, in detail, and reach a conclusion.

Unless Scottish football cleans this mess up it will spread; there is no way it ends now, not after today, not after this verdict. The campaign will go on and it will last as long as it takes and from now until its successful conclusion we will call what happened in those years cheating and we will call the SFA and the SPFL’s failure to act a cover-up and we will call the clubs and those in them who did not act the cowards that they are.

Scottish football has been royally grafted by the people who ran that club in the EBT years. If the game here does not respond to that, acknowledge it, and act on it then it is telling the world that cheating is acceptable. And giving fans no reason to attend games.

And all the chaos that causes in the future will be for nothing anyway because no matter what happens in the here and now those titles will go; the historical facts of this period will be recorded and remembered and sooner or later there will be a reckoning even after the long slow death of Scottish football has been set in motion.

The Violation Of SFA Regulations (That We Know Of)

This case involved, amongst other things, the definite violation of SFA rules.

The SFA maintains that it is impartial here; it is not. It never has been. They cannot act as a “final avenue of appeal” as CEO Stewart Regan has said, whilst they are, themselves, up to their necks in this affair. And this verdict makes it clear that they are exactly that.

One of the elements of what Rangers did here involved the concealment of documents. The SFA played a role in that. Campbell Ogilvie was on the SFA board the whole time, even as he sat on the Rangers board which ran the scheme. We know, in fact, that it is his signature which adorns the paperwork which established the original EBT scam, the Discounted Options Scheme, in the first place. He helped oversee a similar scheme at Hearts.

It is not enough, and it has never been enough, to say that Ogilvie should have “recused himself” from this affair; he wasn’t acting in an individual capacity.

He was acting as an official at the Scottish Football Association, which he went on to become chairman of. Campbell Ogilvie didn’t need to “recuse himself” here; the organisation at the heart of all this ought to have taken itself completely out of the process.

Think of Scottish football today as a crime scene, where the investigators have arrived to find a picture that is complex and chaotic, for that’s exactly what it is. We know that a crime has taken place. That much is established as a fact.

We also know the names of some of those who were involved, in one way or another.

Separate those people from everyone else.

The organisations they work for are involved in this somehow.

There are only two possible explanations for how they are involved. The SFA are either victims of this crime or they are part of it … they should not, under any circumstances, be involved in its investigation and prosecution either way.

SFA regulations on the financial disclosure were not followed.

Regulations on the declaration of contract details were ignored.

There was a cover-up.

The SFA has a statutory right to investigate those matters and prosecute the club on its own for those offences, but the second it decided not to it abrogated its responsibility for any further involvement. It ceased to have any rights to act is judge and jury after the fact. It should have acted as a “rubber stamp” on the ultimate decision and any appeal should have gone to the Court of Arbitration in Sport.

It was absolutely wrong for the SFA to set itself up as a court of appeal in a matter where its own rules had been violated. If could have prosecuted such a case, it has that power, but the final decision would have rested, then, with CAS.

The second the SFA decided it wasn’t going to prosecute the case itself it gave up the right to further involvement.

And that should have extended to offering testimony. Why was its “head of registrations” ever called to the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry? Why was he allowed to go there and give the evidence he did if the SFA was going to act as a “court of appeal”?

Their conduct throughout all of this stunk to high heaven, and it still stinks today. They cannot pretend non-involvement or non-interest. They are involved whether they like it or not. A full inquiry into just how they are involved is clearly required.

Are they innocent victims of a failure to disclose documents and meet the regulations … or did they assist Rangers in a policy of concealment the highest court in the land has decided was tax fraud? Are there facts which are pertinent today about which we are still unaware?

Were they, in fact, a party to everything that went on at Ibrox?

Until that, above all, is examined and that question definitively answered they cannot be treated as an impartial observer in these events … and clubs ought not to treat them as such.

The Cover Up: Lord Nimmo Smith And A Wee Word Off The Record

Earlier this week, we heard that Neil Doncaster has said the SPL stands behind the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry, and that he ruled out any further investigation into these affairs, as if that was his decision to make and his alone.

It will not stand, partly because the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry itself should be re-examined.

There are facts in the public domain which render it utterly invalid.

The only way to get to the bottom of that is by giving this over to an independent inquiry which can set its own frame of reference and examine the facts in full.

Lord Nimmo Smith’s inquiry was established by the SPL in August 2012.

Amongst others, those who currently sit on the board of Sevco were furious when it was. Alastair Johnston called it a “kangaroo court.” McCoist said he would not regard its verdict as binding. When it was established, it was supposed to be an examination into the whole issue of “side-letters” and EBT use. There is something important to remember here; it was set up only to examine those side letters and to answer the charge that rules had been broken.

Lord Nimmo Smith had no mandate to speak on the issue of “sporting integrity.” The inquiry said in its introduction that it was not concerned with matters relating to the “big tax case” court case. And then it based its final decision on the findings it had to hand from that case.

It is important to consider what this means. It means that LNS had no basis on which to make its “no sporting advantage” claim based on the verdict as it stood at the time, which was that Rangers had acted within the law. That was never the point of the inquiry.

But by choosing to do so, it has tied itself irrevocably to the verdict in that case.

The Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry existed solely to determine whether or not rules were broken in relation to the side letters. The most important thing to remember is that it concluded that they were. It says this, in black and white.

Rules were broken, those of the league and the SFA.

Rangers was found guilty of those breaches.

The question LNS had to answer was whether or not those breaches merited the stripping of titles, and the SFA’s decision to offer the exculpatory evidence in the case – that given by Sandy Bryson – was crucial in that regard.

I would argue that the SFA should never have been allowed to do so.

It is, if you like, as if an appeal court judge appeared as a witness in a case which he would, later on, have to stand in judgement of. All involved ought to be thankful that the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry never had the status of “a legal proceeding.”

I would argue that calling the SFA’s head of registrations invalidated their role as a “court of appeal” in the case, and that alone renders it moot, as it offered no recourse at all for any party which felt wronged by the eventual decision in the case.

But the Nimmo Smith commission operated on the basis of a lie in the first place, when its remit was altered in a way that considered EBT use as a single issue and not two separate cases. It then used a legal verdict of “not guilty” to underpin its principal finding.

It makes the decision to limit the scope of the investigation all the more suspect when one considers that such a thing would not have been possible in the Discounted Options Scheme case, where there had already been a legal verdict and where that scheme had been declared illegal.

Of course, there was never a “single” EBT scheme and in attempting to argue that LNS conflated a scheme which had been found illegal with one that was still under appeal. The basis for the final finding collapses the second you consider that.

I have never believed that Nimmo Smith was aware of everything he should have been. He was given a remit, which had been set elsewhere. He was never told about the Discounted Options Scheme, or that it was a separate matter. That information would have been in the hands of the SPL and was certainly in the hand of the SFA. For their own reasons they chose to mislead the very Commission they had established to get to the facts.

But it was never to be given all the facts.

The decision to let Campbell Ogilvie – whose signature established the Discounted Options Scheme, which was conveniently set aside in the inquiry – give evidence is further damnation of the SFA’s position as a “final court of appeal.”

It was involved in this affair from the get-go. Its officials should have been questioned as part of the inquiry into the wider issue, as a subject of the investigation, instead of being allowed to give evidence which, effectively, exonerated the club and its own officials.

Indeed, the central claim they made, that a rule breach cannot be punished because it was not discovered at the time, is perhaps the most laughable assertion that has ever been presented to a learned member of the bench. It is farcical. It is rendered ludicrous not only by numerous examples and precedents but by the SFA’s own rulebook and the whole concept of integrity in the sport, which LNS was never, anyway, supposed to examine.

And it would not stand up to examination in any actual legal hearing, anywhere in the world. A crime which was not discovered when it was committed is not actually a crime? Try arguing that in a courtroom. You wouldn’t last two seconds.

The SPL decided the frame of reference here. That excluded key evidence. It allowed those who were setting themselves up as an “appeal court” to offer testimony in the case, rendering the whole thing moot by virtue of giving any appeal nowhere to go. And I used to think this was a mere accident, something that was just never properly thought through, but that underestimates the people involved; they left nothing to chance.

Because had LNS actually acted according to his brief, and disregarded the incredible testimony of Sandy Bryson, and had title stripping been his decision, it would never have taken place. All of what I’ve just argued would have been offered in mitigation by the guilty, and the whole thing would have been thrown out.

That inquiry was not only prejudiced, it was sabotaged.

The verdict was not rigged as much as it the entire framework of the case was deliberately built to collapse if a collapse had been what was required at the end of it.

We know this was done deliberately, because we know that before the hearing had even taken place that Rangers and Sevco had been presented with a cast iron “no title stripping” guarantee which effectively rendered the whole inquiry a fraud.

We know it as The Letter Of Undertaking, and it was sent to Charles Green’s NewCo, named in the document as Sevco.

This is important, because it is Doncaster himself who tells us continually that Rangers and Sevco are the same thing; in light of this, the words here are a clear pledge that title stripping will not take place. The crucial paragraph is as follows;

“The SPL hereby undertakes solely and exclusively to Sevco and to no other Person (defined below), that notwithstanding clause 2.1 of the Agreement that the SPL shall not after Completion take or commence disciplinary proceedings against Sevco under and in terms of the SPL Rules (as defined in the Agreement) for an alleged breach of the SPL Articles (as defined in the Agreement) and/or the SPL Rules by RFC and/or Rangers FC (as defined in the Agreement) prior to Completion in respect of any EBT Payments and Arrangements (as defined below), except where any such EBT Payments and Arrangements shall constitute a CW Enduring Act or Acts (as defined in the Agreement)(“the Undertaking”).”

The SPL had no intention of ever stripping those titles, and it told Sevco that before the inquiry had even sat. This was a put-up job right from the start, and in light of the “Letter Of Undertaking”, the decision to have SFA officials give evidence and the deliberate restriction of the LNS inquiries frame of reference so that it didn’t include the Discounted Options Scheme we cannot but conclude that the verdict was decided before the hearing … we never stood a chance.

And because of that, Lord Nimmo Smith’s entire finding doesn’t hold water.

Brown Paper Bags: Crime In Football, And The UEFA Issue

Rangers have been found guilty of a tax scam.

That’s the long and short of it. The Discounted Options Scheme had already been ruled as “tax evasion”, a criminal offence. This verdict ascribes the same standing to the entirety of the EBT matter, and football cannot pretend that paying players through the proceeds of a crime is something that can stand.

Forget, for a moment, the issue of the side-letters, which on its own ought to cast the result of every one of the games played in the EBT years into the furnace. The wider issue here, arising from this verdict, is that for at least a decade Rangers was paying its players out of brown paper bags. There might not be football regulations which deal explicitly with that point, but that issue lies at the centre of why financial disclosure regulations exist at all.

If we had evidence that a club had been laundering money there would be no question of football sanctions.

They would follow almost automatically, and would be amongst the most serious in the history of the game.

That is without question.

And it’s clearly not within the remit of the SFA to deal with something on that scale; they would have had to recuse themselves from such a case, especially when their own registrations had been compromised, and had it over to an agency with much larger, more sweeping, powers of investigation.

An issue like this might have better been dealt with at the European football level, except that they were also involved by virtue of games in their competitions being compromised by the invalid registration of players. Once you accept that players were improperly registered in Scotland – as LNS did – you cannot but conclude they were also unable to pass muster at UEFA. They could have investigated that matter independently – as the SFA could have examined the wider issue themselves without going to LNS in the first place – but that might have rendered them unable to offer guidance on the cases specific to football here.

That would have been a legal minefield sufficient to give them ample cause for referring the matter elsewhere.

This always belonged to an agency operating outside of football, but with its authority given to it by the agencies which run the sport. A UEFA appointed inquiry could examine the eligibility issue in both their competitions and in the domestic game with the matter referred to CAS in the event of any appeal.

That would have been fitting and right.

UEFA’s own statutes on Financial Fair Play and the disclosure of information insist upon the full details of payments being laid out in a transparent manner. This is why contract information and financial statements must be submitted to them in the first place. They have the prima face authority to decide not only whether that non-disclosure represented an offence but whether the nature of the payments themselves did and LNS was never authorised to do that.

UEFA’s own financial fair play regulations place a high premium on the payment of taxes due. Rangers knew what they were doing violated not only tax law but because of that it broke football law as well. That is explicitly why they concealed those facts in the first place.

The concealment had two objectives; to hide what they were doing from the tax man and to hide it from football itself, because UEFA would have brought in its own legal team to analyse the EBT’s if they had known about the side-letters and the efforts to keep them out of sight of Revenue and Customs.

Rangers were hiding what they were doing from them as much as they were from HMRC, and the very fact they were concealing this from the tax man violated UEFA statutes on “tax liabilities payable” in the most unbelievable fashion.

For over ten years.

And we know – for a fact – that this concealment continued up to the LNS inquiry itself, when Rangers and Sevco both attempted to further hide evidence from that body. This was a process which didn’t end even with the Craig Whyte administration. Rangers’ attempts to hide all the facts from football’s governing bodies was ongoing, throughout.

It is as clear-cut a violation of UEFA’s rules as you will get.

Now that the nature of what Rangers did is an established fact, UEFA has a responsibility to decide whether or not what happened here was a crime against football; I cannot conceive of any argument that could be made to the contrary.

A Very Brief History Of Sanctions

Football has long taken seriously anything which brought the game into disrepute and adversely affected the “level playing field” and the “integrity of the sport.”

For failure to properly register players the sanction has almost always been that the game in question is invalidated and a 3-0 win handed to the opposition. Prize money relative to that match has been withheld or reclaimed.

Even in cases where the offence is accidental, rather than deliberate, the consequence is usually the same; there is ample precedent at UEFA and, yes, even here in Scotland, which supports the assertion that this punishment is virtually automatic.

Issues around bribery and corruption have resulted in teams being stripped of trophies.

Relegations have taken place.

Bans on individuals involved are commonplace.

Even members of football’s governing agencies have been subjected to those punishments, such as in cases where referees have been paid or officials took part in covering up.

There are examples from Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England and elsewhere which support the notion that events which threaten the integrity of the sport can be punished even long after the period when they took place. Bryson’s ridiculous claim would not be supported anywhere in the football world and even if it were somehow accurate I doubt that it would cover any event where a club’s action had brought them into conflict with the law.

Where corruption and cheating has been found after the fact, clubs have been deducted points, banned from competitions, had titles taken from them, massive fines levied against them and persons involved as good as drummed out of the sport.

Rangers concealment of documents for a decade, their failure to properly comply with an inquiry set up to investigate that, the nature of the offence itself … all this stands up to one of the gravest offences against sporting integrity in European football history.

And because of that, this matter cannot merely be dealt with by Europe’s football authorities; it has to go beyond them, to someone who can get to the bottom of this on their behalf and recommend whatever sanctions seem appropriate to it.

Title Stripping Is Not Something That Should Happen. It Has To.

Paul McConville wrote an excellent summary of this at the time; he concluded that the SPL would never “appeal” the Lord Nimmo Smith decision, but that they were perfectly entitled to. He said that would never happen, and Neil Doncaster agrees.

He believes the matter has been set aside.

Paul also specifically said that the Upper Tier Tribunal appeal – the one which has just been completed at the Supreme Court – would have no bearing on that decision even in the event that Rangers were found guilty of everything people have been alleging for years.

And, once again, he is correct.

But LNS is a smokescreen. I’ve covered it here because I had to, because it would be the subject of every comment on this piece and the basis by which the verdict just in would be ignored. But to all intents and purposes, LNS is a bust.

No-one is asking that the decision he made be appealed.

The LNS inquiry’s entire remit was set by the SPL to exclude evidence, not to examine it. The SPL allowed the so-called “appellate body” to give evidence. It offered the very people being prosecuted a guarantee of no major sanctions in the event the judgement found them guilty. It was an investigation into a fraud governed by another one.

We are significantly beyond LNS here.

What’s required here is an inquiry into the whole shady affair, the LNS inquiry included.

Let’s not forget here that his Commission found Rangers guilty on all counts, but it based its recommendations as to what should be done about that on incomplete information and a series of brazen lies. It was concerned only with the registration of players, and relied in no small part on an interpretation of the rules which govern those which was offered to it by someone with a vested interest in spinning it the right way.

Ogilvie was involved in the EBT affair at every juncture. In allowing him to be questioned Nimmo Smith became party to the fraud in which the SFA President was involved. In accepting his testimony in the Finding, LNS based in no small part on his veracity.

When that happens in a court of law we call it perjury. It is an offence that not only results in the punishment of those guilty of it, but can over-turn all the judgements on which it is based. If we were arguing to appeal LNS that’s the argument we might use.

But as I said, we’re beyond Nimmo Smith.

We’re not talking here about an appeal. We’re talking about a full-scale examination of the whole affair, and those who were involved in it. Scottish football has, for the past five years, operated as if this was a minor aberration. That, too, is part of what’s gone wrong. The scam didn’t end with Craig Whyte and the liquidation of Rangers any more than it was born with the birth of Sevco. All these issues are intertwined now.

At the heart of this are two organisations, the SPL and the SFA, which had a vested interest in the outcome, and in a “no title stripping” guarantee. Even had the SFA been able to act as an appellate body in this matter I do not believe they would have been impartial; they couldn’t be. Had LNS not gone the way they wanted it, I still don’t believe title stripping would ever have taken place because on its own the SFA would never have done it.

This was too big for their slippery fingers. It remains so today. The only way that a verdict can be arrived at which settles this matter, once and for all, is if the matter is removed from the remit of the governing bodies and placed in a truly independent one that can examine not only the single, narrow, issue of the side-letter but what the legality of the whole affair was, what the impact was on the integrity of the sport, whether UEFA as well as Scottish rules were broken and whether or not the SFA ought to have been allowed to play a role in LNS and matters peripheral to it, or whether or not its own officials were involved in these affairs.

Such an inquiry would not be cheap.

I would be willing to bet that there would be widespread interest in crowd-funding some of it if necessary.

It would not be done in a day.

But this matter has already dragged on for five long years, and Scottish football fans have learned to be patient.

But it is necessary; in fact it is essential if Scottish football is to get beyond this affair. It is something that simply must happen, and if the governing bodies will not willingly set that inquiry up the clubs must take that matter out of their hands.

For more than ten years Rangers operated by fraud and deceit. Amongst those involved are people working at Sevco today. The organisations that were supposed to protect the rest of the game have been protecting the guilty ever since.

This was a crime against the exchequer, but more than that, it was a crime against football itself.

These are the facts of the case, and as of today they are undisputed. We know that Rangers with-held money from the tax man. We know they covered that up. We know that they lied about doing so. We know they continued to lie, long after the truth was established. We know that footballers were improperly registered here and abroad. We know they were paid by the proceeds of a scam. These are some of the most serious offences in the history of sport on this island.

And the punishment must reflect the seriousness of the crimes.

Their guilt is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

It will be the job of any inquiry to decide what the sanctions must be.