Think of the brass neck it takes to do things this way.
Jesus. Think on it for a moment.
Think of the brass neck it takes to move to a football club on the understanding that you’ll be paid a good salary but that part of it will come from a “loan” so that you and they can avoid income tax and PAYE. Think of the gall it takes to do that, whilst other people out there in the real world – the supporters who pay for tickets every week – are scraping by.
Imagine sitting through years of speculation over this, your only defence for your absolutely immoral behaviour to say that the tainted titles your club won were on the park, all the while acknowledging that you wouldn’t have signed for them in the first place without your wee brown envelope.
How disgusting. How absolutely without shame.
Imagine sitting through media conferences, sitting through Lord Nimmo Smith, and all the while thinking you were the cat who got the cream because for all the talk of punishment and title stripping and everything else there was never, at any point, the suggestion that you yourself might be a brazen little SOB who needed to pay something too.
Now imagine the brass neck it takes at the tail end of all this to actually lose the plot when a very different wee brown envelope drops through your door telling you that Hector is coming, that you are liable after all, that aside from the potentially Hellish consequences which still await the club’s dalliance with this form of cheating, that you yourself are going to have to put your hand in your pocket and pay back what you owe.
Imagine then having the balls to call up your financial advisor and threatening to sue him or her for giving you “bad information.”
Jesus. Think on it for a moment.
Bad information.
That’s what some of them are claiming, shrieking wildly, trying to slither off the hook.
Well, no joy folks.
Wiggle like the worms you are.
Knowing what all of us know now, are any of you in any doubt these people knew what they were doing and what they were getting involved in? They make a conscious decision to keep their earnings as far away from HMRC and the public purse as possible and really, I don’t want to hear the slightest wailing from any one of them.
They knew it was a scam.
If they didn’t know there was a chance of getting caught well, a fool and his money are parted soon enough.
Some will go bankrupt because of this.
That’s just tough luck.
A lot of small companies were at risk of that when Rangers went out of business without paying what they owed. I don’t remember a single EBT recipient offering to pay the taxi company or the face painter. Like the club itself, they looked out for themselves.
And now the rent is coming due, and for some the bill is going to be enormous.
There’s no way out for these people; they are facing repayment, fines and late penalties.
Some will owe millions.
Good. I hope it does lasting, permanent, damage to some of them.
The press will squeal on their behalf – enough of them are in the media to fill a newsroom, albeit a crap one – but Hector will pay no more heed to that than he will to the hollering that went on when he consigned Rangers to death with the stroke of a pen.
These people have spent the last ten or so years laughing at us, all of us, and the fans above all.
No-one should mourn a single one of them.