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.
