Today, RTC leaked the latest damning evidence of the SFA’s collusion over Rangers and their use of EBT’s.
We now know that HMRC contacted the Association in 2009, a full year before the story of the EBT’s broke in the national press.
Not only did they tell the SFA that they knew what Rangers was up to, but they asked for further information from them. There is little doubt the Association either made inquiries of Rangers, or already knew all they needed to know.
There’s also no doubt that the SFA did the sum total of nil.
With-holding those documents meant players were ineligible. An investigation into that should have been opened immediately at the Hampden offices. Not only was it not, the club continued to use those tax scams for a further year … and that alone tells you that the SFA didn’t act.
What did those inquiries turn up?
As there were no consequences you have to assume one of two things;
Either Rangers lied to them, and that lie was amplified, spectacularly, by the presence at the top of the SFA of the man who had set the club on its course with the EBT scam, Campbell Ogilvie or the club told the SFA those side-contracts existed and confirmed HMRC’s suspicions.
They would have known Rangers failure to set out those contracts in detail was being done for the purposes of cheating the tax man; the SFA was, therefore, complicit in that act and this on top of the scandal of not dealing with that issue at the time.
One way or another, all Hell should be paid for this revelation.
The media has ignored it, of course, as they have ignored much else.
The idea the SFA would lend assistance to a club in cheating the tax man … well, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?
Except it’s not ridiculous and it’s not even unprecedented.
As I’ve said before and as I never get tired repeating, the SFA and the SPL were willing participants in Craig Whyte’s scandalous non-payment of PAYE in 2011-12, and his efforts to leave the Tax Case itself behind. They knew exactly what his ultimate intentions were, and what the end result of it would be.
They were willing to help him, and Whyte was a dodgy geezer right out of a bad London crime flick.
There is little doubt that they would have bent over backwards to assist David Murray, at that time the most powerful person in the Scottish game, and this is especially true when you consider that the CEO of the SFA at that time was ex-Rangers employee Gordon Smith, who resigned in 2010 in highly conspicuous circumstances.
He has never hidden his allegiances, and they go deep.
During the very first sectarian singing investigations which were being conducted by UEFA he defended the Rangers fans to such an extent that even Jim Traynor could not stomach it and publicly slammed him. Shortly before he was appointed to his role as SFA chief executive – the role Regan assumed when he left – he wrote an article for a book on the club which accused the SFA of having a historical bias against them.
It’s laughable, but this is not funny in the least.
It has never been established how Smith got that job, having met none of the SFA’s very public criteria for the role, nor why he departed. He cited “family reasons”, which is a euphemism very common in politics when somebody quits to avoid a looming scandal.
That’s just speculation, but if we didn’t ask the question nobody would.
Listen, the media can continue to ignore this as they like, but this isn’t coming from the likes of me; this is RTC, this is a blog which won a national investigative journalism award and they ignore that at their peril. The stench of this is overpowering, their ignorance of it makes you wonder just what they themselves have to lose, or have to hide.
It’s a matter of public record that a lot of Scotland’s journalists were in thrall to David Murray, but I know for a fact that certain journalists did their bit for the Whyte regime as well. I know some of their names. They will be familiar to all of you too. I have no qualms about dropping those names and will do it if someone else doesn’t get there first, as I suspect they will. Because it’s all out there, you just have to know where to look.
And it’s all going to come to light, whether that’s in leaks or information bombs like RTC dropped today.
What we already know is devastating enough.
But we suspect there’s much more to come, and that’s why an inquiry is of paramount importance.
The media can shut their ears and eyes to this as much as they like now, because the Bampots have got this, and we’re going to squeeze Regan and the Association like a tube of toothpaste until he squeals like a pig. We can haunt this guy to the grave and I think he’s yellow from back to belly and he’ll cave if we push hard enough. He might not have been there in 2009 but he continues to cover for those who were, and I still think he’ll run when the net starts to close.
It is closing right now.