Celtic has demanded a review into the EBT years, and corporate governance at the SFA.
This is the simple fact which everyone knows. Celtic is a member club of the SFA. We have every right to do this. If the SFA refuses we can take the case to the courts, or UEFA or CAS. We do not need the support of other clubs to do it.
Those are the facts. We have rights. The SFA can deflect, but they cannot deny. There will be a review whether they call it or not; the concern we should have right now is that the strategy at both the SPFL and the SFA has become clearer today.
The two associations, both heavily implicated in this scandal, are playing games over a form of words and that is not an accident. The media leaks are not an accident. The focus on Celtic’s quest for answers over EBT’s is not an accident. It’s all connected. The SFA knows it will have to grant our request or risk this being taken out of their hands … they were never going to stonewall indefinitely. The danger is that they are able to frame that review as they like.
They’ve started already. The Record has been briefed that the SPFL wants the review as long as it doesn’t involve Rangers’ use of EBT’s and that Doncaster and Regan are set for a confrontation over. It. What a deceitful move that is; it’s the one area where they and the SFA are in complete agreement. The objective here is to have that completely excluded from any review from the start, by having its frame of reference set in the same duplicitous way the LNS inquiry was.
When the SPFL next meets the review that will be proposed to the clubs is not the one that Celtic actually wants; it will be the one the governing bodies decided on between themselves all the while saying they will not allow one. They will paint this is a “victory for democracy” after clubs vote for it on the basis that it will be about future procedures.
But that is not what Celtic’s request is based on.
If our club allows this review to be framed by the people it’s supposed to be looking at we’ve blown it.
And between these organisations they are conspiring to give us the review they want and which protects the guilty, rather than the one which Celtic has demanded and which Scottish football needs. It is going to happen this way unless we clue in.
Get ready for the next phase of this, the one where the media swings into support behind an SPFL review based on paper shuffling. It will exclude any reference to the EBT era, which means the events of 2009 which I highlighted yesterday will never be known.
It will exclude anything that has to do with how the SFA made decisions during that period and into 2012.
This is going to be the stitch up of all time if we’re not careful and alert.