The Wee Tax Case Confronted The SFA With A Serious Problem.
Ask any Rangers fan what killed their club and the chances are that you’ll be told it was EBT’s.
This is either because their supporters are colossally ignorant or living in denial. In fact, the EBT scandal had very little to do with what happened to that club after crisis swallowed them up in February 2012. What killed Rangers was that for years it had been running on an unsustainable basis.
Only one thing kept the crash from coming sooner; European football.
In 2010, when the club was presented with its EBT tax bill they were already largely out of options for going forward. When the financial crash came in 2008 it cut off the life-support afforded by the corrupt executives at the Bank of Scotland. When the accounts were taken over by Lloyds they saw, immediately, how much danger the club was in.
European football was critical. In 2008, I had written The End Of Rangers?, my first major online examination of the unfolding Ibrox disaster. I had based it in no small part on Phil’s vital articles on the trouble facing Murray’s companies. I believed the club was so heavily indebted and dependent on bank financing that they could easily collapse if it was removed.
What I didn’t realise at the time was the gigantic importance of European football income. It kept the lights on for a further four years, owing in no small part to our laxity in allowing Smith to secure three titles on the bounce. Without it, they really would have circled the drain in 2010 when HMRC submitted their EBT demand.
It is inconceivable to me that Rangers did not make the SFA aware of how dependent they were on this crucial source of funds. I think that by 2010 people inside Hampden were well aware that Rangers was hanging by a thread and only Group Stage money was keeping on the lights. From the moment the banks refused to keep funding the roadshow that cash was all that kept the wolf from the door. A single year without it … disastrous.
I have always believed the SFA knew the consequences of refusing Rangers a European license; the club would have entered administration almost at once. Furthermore, from 2010, as a result of the Big Tax Case, HMRC would have been a principle creditor and would have controlled the destiny of the club in a CVA. The SFA would have had to know that too.
The Big Tax Case was under appeal by the Murray Group. It would not have adversely affected their European license. But the Wee Tax Case did. Andrew Thornhill, the club’s own lawyer, had made it clear to the board that on that one the tax man had them bang to rights. There were side contracts and HMRC knew it. What’s worse is that the club had initially denied that … and been caught in the lie. Discounted Options Schemes had already been deemed tax evasion … his advice was to plead “no contest” and pay that bill at once.
That bill remained unpaid on the day the club went into administration. No attempt was ever made to negotiate a schedule to repay it. That looms over the SFA and Ibrox to this day. All we have in mitigation is the SFA’s assurance that they did everything by the book, but there is no reason whatsoever to believe that’s true.
In fact, all the evidence suggests the exact opposite. The Resolution 12 guys have identified a number of key areas where they felt the SFA was asleep at the wheel at best; at worst they were a co-conspirator and awarded that license and decided not to inform UEFA of all the facts. That’s what many of us believe and frankly with good reason.
The irony is that it was all for nothing anyway.
Rangers had already made the calamitous series of mistakes which saw all the chickens come home to roost on Valentine’s Day 2012.
It’s widely acknowledged that three football matches sealed their fate.
But actually, it was four.
Following the last of them, the SFA behaved appallingly yet again … and placed our whole game in the centre of the storm that was breaking over Ibrox.
