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.