The Lord Nimmo Smith Fiasco: With-Held Evidence And A Ridiculously Limited Remit.
The two governing bodies in Scottish football, the SPL and the SFA, agreed to hold a previous inquiry into the Rangers EBT era; it was led by Lord Nimmo Smith. The final verdict astonished and appalled people; Rangers had deliberately operated a tax scam, and in doing so withheld information about player contracts from the SFA – an offence which should have rendered each and every match which involved the players concerned ruled null and void.
It would have resulted in more than a dozen trophies being stripped from the record, like happens in other sports where cheating has been established.
Nimmo Smith did not pass that sentence.
Instead he fined the NewCo (who had played no part in the scandal) a trifling sum and left every result and title stand. His rationale was that a decade of tax fraud, which allowed the club to sign dozens of players they otherwise could not have afforded, had conferred “no sporting advantage” to the club.
Read that again; in a game where money allows some clubs to move so far ahead of the rest that you can barely see them in the distance, a senior law lord concluded that a tax scam which let one team amass an expensive squad had not given them an edge over other teams.
The rationale behind that is amongst the most loathsome ever proposed by a legal official; that every other club in the country could have operated the same scheme, but chose not to. It’s like saying that someone bringing a knife fight to a boxing match is simply thinking on their feet and that the loser (i.e. the guy without the knife) should have armed himself.
In addition to this, when the tax case against the OldCo reached the Supreme Court last year evidence was presented which contradicted some of what Nimmo Smith had ruled on, and it became clear that further facts had been with-held from him altogether. He also failed to take into account that the EBT scheme involved two wholly separate tax scams … and one of them had already been ruled illegal by the time the case was heard.
Folding one tax case into another, and restricting the time-frame under investigation, also, conveniently, allowed the SFA President Campbell Ogilvie to escape proper scrutiny; he had been a senior official at Ibrox during the EBT era … and his was the very first signature on the very first document which opened that scam in the first place.
The size of this can only be imagined by those without the full picture.