Dodgy Dave King was in court again yesterday. Or rather, the Takeover Panel of the City of London was in court yesterday in their latest attempt to get him to respect their instructions. This has been dragging on for a long time. He is now openly in contempt. He will not follow the letter of the law. It is no longer about the Takeover Panel itself; he’s now in breach of a court order. He has been instructed to do something, by a panel of judges, and refused.
It doesn’t get more blatant than that.
As usual the media deliberately ignores the facts of this case, wilfully misrepresents them or is too dumb to grasp them in the first place. The legal battles were over a long time ago. The Takeover Panel made an initial ruling and King appealed it. The minute he lost the appeal that was the ball game. There was no going back.
There are no more appeals. There is no more overturning this. Newspaper reports which suggest that he’s in a battle with the Takeover Panel over the verdict itself are printing a fiction whether knowingly or otherwise. This was decided a long way back.
King is now defying the law of the land. The Takeover Panel were the ones who initiated court proceedings in the first place, to compel him to comply with their order. Two courts have now agreed with that, and after the last one instructed King to get on with it he stalled and delayed and seems, finally, to have refused entirely.
And the question as to what the courts are waiting for before they issue a warrant for his arrest is a valid one, but an even more valid one is this; what exactly is the SFA waiting for? This guy could not be a more obvious violation of fit and proper person regulations.
The City of London must be wondering what’s going on as well. If the SFA had hauled King in over his refusal to comply with a UK court order this matter would have ended before now. This is about a football club and his shareholding in it, they cannot claim to have been ignorant of that. And it would be different if this was a matter still under appeal in the courts, but as I’ve said the central issue here is King’s refusal to do what a court says.
That’s not him being difficult. It is criminal. And the SFA has ignored it. How long they do so will decide how great the stink is when this guy finally winds up in handcuffs. It’s not that you cannot see it coming; it is certain. It is a matter of time.