So Rangers’ creditors are set to get stiffed. Again. This is probably the least surprising revelation of the day save for Derek McInnes telling the media that for all the bluster from their tame PR toadies Skinto hasn’t made Aberdeen an offer for his services.
Today has reminded us that amidst all the nonsense which the Survival Lie perpetuates are some irksome truths a lot of people would rather not face; what Rangers did was a crime not just against football but against Scottish society, and that there were victims here, honest to God ones, and not just the football clubs who have tamely rolled over since.
The people in question will get around four pence in the pound of the money they were due.
Some of them long since wrote off the money, for others this will be a severe blow. The screwing just goes on and on and on. Those with an interest in football will have seen the SFA’s backside covering of a few months ago with despair and anger.
They do have one recourse to the law, as I’ve said already, and that’s to report the governing body for fraud … but I wonder how many of them would know that, or be willing to push it in that way.
We constant watchers know what happened. The evidence that the SFA was well aware of what Whyte intended, from at least November 2011, is pretty overwhelming. That they and the league body decided not to put a stop to his scam – instead they helped him with it – is abhorrent. Every single company that did business with the club after that was being conned. They were being defrauded and the SFA and SPL were parties to that fraud.
Those people might as well give their cut of the pot to charity.
Four pence in the pound is an insult to them after they’ve waited this long, but the greater insult was the one the SFA delivered when they announced they wouldn’t set up an independent inquiry into what happened on their watch.
They can talk all they want about moving on, but it was pure self-defence.
Had that inquiry gone ahead people would have lost their jobs and that would have been the least of it.
Some might have wound up in court.
I hope those people have their day when all this is done. I hope some of them stand in front of our media and tell them what all of us know; that they regard Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster as accomplices after the fact, people every bit as guilty as Whyte himself. I doubt it will move a single club to demand the inquiry this game needs but it might well cause a twinge of guilt, even shame, in some of the boardrooms who want to dismiss what happened as unimportant.
What this does of course is it spreads the shame. There are those who committed acts of fraud. There are those who aided them. There are those who covered them up. And then there are those who looked the other way and pretended it wasn’t happening.
Even now, no-one wants to fight for these people or the integrity of our sport.
No-one but Celtic.
As such, this disgrace will linger. It will fester. It will grow.
It will be with Scottish football forever.