Imagine you were the head of a regulatory agency which had uncovered evidence of a plot to deceive your organisation by concealing important documents, failures of oversight, multiple violations of your rules and regulations and the very sort of systemic cheating of your governing body existed to protect against.
Now imagine that one of the people who was responsible for those appalling actions wanted to play a little game of fox in the chicken coup, by getting onto your regulatory board. The one he and those he worked for had so flagrantly scammed.
You would tell him to go to Hell, right?
You would have to.
Because what else could you do? If you did other than that you’d be just asking for trouble. You might even be subject to harsh questions about whether or not putting him there would open your organisation up to accusations of cover-ups. These things are business as usual at the SFA.
Andrew Dickson has sat on both the Rangers and Sevco boards. His list of regulatory failures alone, including not properly vetting Whyte and ignoring evidence of Murray’s growing debt problems, are evidence that he simply cannot be trusted.
There are two explanations for why he was so bad as an Ibrox administrator. Either he was scandalously lax when it came to fulfilling his duties as a director in that he never asked the right questions or he knew the answers and was either complicit in what was happening or allowed it to.
In either case – whether he knew what others were up to or didn’t – he’s unfit to sit on the board of any other organisation.
If it were only this, that would be enough.
But Dickson was Head of Registrations at Ibrox.
He knew about EBT’s. He had one of them, for £33,000. He didn’t inform the SFA although as a member of the Rangers board he was under obligation to do so. This guy shouldn’t be near an SFA post, but here he is on their Congress even as the Rangers Tax Case publishes information which suggests that two former Rangers managers were being paid by the club whilst working elsewhere … and at times when the Ibrox side were the beneficiaries in highly irregular transfer deals.
There is no other association in football that would allow a man who had so egregiously failed in his duties to sit on a major board. It is a scandal. Indeed, that the club nominated him for the post in the first place looks like a calculated insult to the rest of us. We’re calling for an independent inquiry into what’s being going on at the SFA and Sevco has nominated one of the people directly involved in that series of events to sit on one of their boards.
That’s a message, is it not?
That’s a sign of how they view the rest of the game.
It is an act of astonishing brazenness.
This is what we’re up against though, folks. Things at Ibrox have been out of control for a long, long time but it could never have gone as far as it has without the connivance of those who were supposed to be looking out for the best interests of our game.