The Scottish Football Monitor has turned out another wonderful piece of work, cementing its reputation as the most influential of the blogs. It is an extended piece from ex Celtic campaigner David Low, one of the men behind the Fergus revolution.
He is a thoroughly credible individual, impossible for anyone in the media or elsewhere to simply dismiss as a crank or conspiracy theorist. With a background in finance, and impeccable credentials, he is someone who should be listened to right across the spectrum.
What makes his article all the more remarkable is that it distils a lot of stuff that’s been discussed elsewhere, puts it in a very user-friendly form and makes a compelling case that anyone in the media could have made, putting this in the public domain and refuting some of the more egregious falsehoods of the King “plan.”
The Scottish Football Monitor has done the job the mainstream press has completely failed to do. They have taken soundings from someone who knows exactly what he’s talking about, who has enough experience and expertise in corporate affairs to speak with both intelligence and insight and have asked him straight; “what’s going on here?”
And Low has delivered, with aplomb.
His principle contention, that King will have to resign as Sevco chairman – indeed, Low thinks that in order to prevent “contamination” he should have gone already – and even then it will not be enough to free the club from this matter, is devastating.
His argument – that this has put Sevco firmly in the crosshairs of the City of London’s regulatory bodies – is both cogent and factual.
That any scenario, whether King stays or goes, in which the club issues shares or does a shares to equity swap, is liable to result in another party or parties themselves breaching the 30% threshold is one that other sites, this one included, have flagged … but never in quite so much detail, or with such gravitas behind it.
“If King does the right thing by resigning from the board, it is still important to appreciate that the ‘4 Bear’ Concert Party as determined by The Panel will continue to exist irrespective of how Kings deals with the instruction to make an offer for the shares,” he writes. “This is the elephant in the room that remains.”
And it’s that problem which the media has gone out of its way to ignore, although it is so obvious that even laypersons in the blogosphere have been speculating on it for months. Low is not telling those who’ve followed this case much they didn’t know; what he is doing is making it obvious that those who’s duty it was to educate and inform their readers have singularly failed to do so, either out of stupidity and/or laziness or other motives.
The elephant in the room. Something enormous, which people are willingly ignoring. Described in the Oxford Dictionary thus; “A major problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but is avoided as a subject for discussion.”
Not only does King’s behaviour put the other members of the “concert party” under pressure but they open the club up to additional risks, whether King is there or not.
“It doesn’t end there,” Low writes. “By challenging the authority and insulting the intelligence of The Panel and the Court, King has ensured all large share transactions in RIFC will be scrutinised and questioned and could additionally determine, for example, that the Concert Party is increased to include Club 1872 and Barry Scott on the basis they are working in concert with King and/or other concert party members.”
King has endangered the club. His wide-boy manner was always going to place them in jeopardy. He has not the least bit of respect for institutions or their rules, as he has made plain time and time again. That his attitude and ego would place the club in peril, either through arrogance or ignorance, has been obvious from the day and hour he took over the boardroom.
He should never have been granted “fit and proper person” status, and the decision to do so casts shame across our game. Low does not miss the “governing bodies” either, or their media toadies, as this withering section spells out;
“Perhaps unfortunately for a large slug of the mainstream media and football authorities, financial pariah status pursuant to cold shouldering in the UK coming on top of criminal convictions in SA would be impossible to spin in any positive way or to maintain continued fit and proper status. I mean, we could have the SFA cold shouldered, couldn’t we? All said though, the cognitively dissonant will carry on regardless.”
It’s not only the media and the SFA which is going to have to start thinking about this stuff; it’s the Sevco fans themselves, if their new club is not to go the same way as their previous one did. As many of the Bampots have pointed out time and time again, there is no happy ending here for them whilst this man and his board of Real Rangers Men are in charge.
The managerial fiascos which have dominated the headlines these past 12 months were a sideshow compared to the problems behind the scenes, and they were, in fact, a consequence of those much bigger issues. It does not matter which loser they find for the electric chair behind the football boss’s desk, those larger problems are the real killers and they will remain as long as King and this current board does.
These people never sack themselves. They will have to be removed, and that means the Sevco fans coming together and taking the appropriate action. This is what the darkness looks like. I don’t see a way out of it for them.