Today, Auldheid published a tour de force piece over on the E-Tims site, the sort of article that deserves a wide audience, the sort that should be the focus of debate and discussion for years to come. It is excellent, and it wraps the noose around the necks of all involved.
Some of them have skipped off into the sunset, but that’s no defence if a later inquiry decides to pull their pensions and if others decide to pursue the matter in the courts.
I amazed how many people I still encounter who do not understand how enormous, and how significant, this is.
I am amazed how many of them don’t fully grasp the seriousness of what we’re talking about here.
As far as the license issue went, Celtic were chasing this matter up privately before the shareholders put Resolution 12 on the table, but that was the moment it ceased to be something that the SFA could control by telling folks everything was okay.
In order to understand the stakes involved here, you have to see it as a non-football matter.
This was an issue in football, but it was bigger than that.
This was a huge fraud and it was committed against our club.
View this for what it was; a corporate scandal involving tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds.
It is a scandal about governance.
The SFA had a duty to ensure that its competitions were fair.
It failed in that duty, and spectacularly so.
The fact is, they were at best lax and at worst co-conspirators.
That impacted on Celtic.
Celtic has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to ensure they were not being conned.
Other clubs suffered here as well.
If our club had played in the Champions League Groups in season 2011-12, we would have netted somewhere in the region of £25 million.
That money may have resulted in profits and that would have seen our shareholders all paid a small dividend.
If a regulatory body knowingly made a corrupt decision that cost shareholders money that is a matter of the utmost consequence.
Now as far as Resolution 12 goes, that was about one season … but there was a whole decade before that when similarly venal things were going on.
This has potentially cost us more than £100 million.
And what Auldheid makes abundantly clear in his article is that in 2012, when Rangers was coming apart and everything was coming out for the first time, the SFA’s main priority was covering up its own involvement, and trying to make sure that it never came to light.
But it has, all of it.
This issue is not going away, and the SFA’s disciplinary case is just the start. This goes beyond Resolution 12, and even EBT’s. It plays into the broader issue of what the SFA allowed to happen during that time, and what they, themselves were up to.
People say we’ll never get anywhere with this.
But we’re taking down a stonewall here … these people have bunkered up.
But it’s coming apart one brick at a time.
Remember, Richard Nixon did not resign his office over the Watergate burglary.
People who don’t know the full scope of that affair often surmise that the burglary itself was the thing that brought him down.
But the burglary at the Watergate complex was the window through which the media and the American people eventually came to see the whole nexus of operations and scams and scandals the Nixon White House was involved in.
The burglary was a dot on the landscape.
The landscape itself was filled with even greater offences.
Resolution 12 is our window.
The document that set up the Discounted Options Scheme – the Wee Tax Case – at its heart has the signature of Campbell Ogilvie on it.
This is not in dispute. It is a fact.
Richard Nixon was brought down for trying to cover Watergate up.
He went to the FBI and told them to drop their investigation into the burglary because of what else they might find.
And that – obstruction of justice – was one of the central planks in the case that was built against him.
I have always believed that as with that case one lie beget another lie beget another lie.
So it is with this one.
Remember, every cover-up results in another layer of lies … and those lies themselves then have to be carefully airbrushed from view.
Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of confidential reports about the Vietnam War – which is what the exceptional movie The Post is about; thanks to Phil for his recommend on that – inspired Nixon to create the “intelligence gathering unit” he and his colleagues nicknamed “the plumbers.”
Their job, as they saw it, was to plug leaks.
They morphed into a dirty tricks apparatus of incredible proportions.
That unleashed the chaos that brought him down.
And part of it was simply that they ended up launching operations to clean up the mess of prior operations to clean up the mess of prior operations and so forth.
In the intelligence world when an operation results in consequences that actually make matters worse they call it “blowback.”
And that’s what happened here.
One lie beget another lie beget another lie … they constructed an entire edifice of cover up on top of cover up on top of cover up.
I understand how it happened.
If you assume they believed Rangers would collapse and take Scottish football with it, I even understand why it happened.
But that doesn’t make it right.
It was as wrong as you could get.
Auldheid has laid it all out, and not only Resolution 12 but the way lies over that fed into what happened when the SFA was forced, by those circumstances, to investigate Rangers’ EBT usage over a ten year period prior to the administration and liquidation of the club.
It damns Regan and others.
It shames the mainstream press who never put this together.
I will write an examination of the key points later on, but the article itself deserves a full reading by everyone with an interest in this matter.
You can check out clicking on this link, and please do.