Last night, just before I logged out for the night, a story caught my eye on the BBC website.
It was written by Douglas Fraser, their business and economy editor in Scotland. His article, entitled “King of Ibrox: Stringing along the Court” is a masterpiece in calling out the glib and shameless liar for what he is, and I wonder why more pieces like it have not been put out there.
But the most intriguing part of the article was the way Douglas Fraser chose to end it, with a paragraph that leaped out at me at once.
“He’ll have to make up his mind before 16 August, when the case is reconvened? Yes, yet again, the Scottish courts are taking a long time to handle this. I’m told it could have been taken to an English court, and would probably have been concluded a long time ago.”
Fraser is onto something here; he cannot fathom why the courts have indulged King for as long as they have, and the suggestion that this would have been handled very differently had the case been heard in England is a big red flashing warning beacon to me.
Is he suggesting that the Scottish legal system is dragging this out because King is who King is? Is this incompetence he’s talking about here, or something else? Because the question has been raised over and over and over again; King is openly in contempt of court, so exactly what is the judiciary waiting for here? They look ridiculous, giving this guy chance after chance.
To simplify matters, look at the way a court in England dealt with Jon Flanagan yesterday. He was hauled before them for missing one community service session, and they fined him for it. King has been defying the Takeover Panel and the courts since April, in a most brazen fashion. He lied to them in his deposition where he claimed to be skint. If he isn’t in contempt of court already, you have to wonder just what it will take for him to be.
Fraser also mentions the farce that is the SFA “fit and proper” criteria, and that’s fitting because King’s blatant disregard for the law of the land comes as absolutely no surprise to those of us who said he should never have been allowed near the Scottish game in the first place. He is one of the most grotesquely unfit individuals we’ve ever had in football here, and many of us were saying it right from the start.
The glacial pace of the court system is nothing on how slowly the SFA is moving. Fraser thinks the courts might be relying on the threat of “sporting sanctions” to whip King into line; he’s clearly not been paying attention in class. As this week has showed in crystal clear fashion, Sevco does not fear the SFA even a little because they have been staggeringly incompetent in dealing with him up until now. It is going to take something drastic to change that.
The King case has dragged on for what seems like forever. I said at the start that justice moves slowly, but Fraser clearly believes it would have moved much less slowly had the case been held outside of Scottish jurisdiction.
When you consider that one of the key figures in the Charles Green saga, Imran Ahmed, refused to come here for trial because he believed that he couldn’t get a fair crack with so many “Rangers minded” people in and around the legal system, you really do have to wonder if there’s not more going on here than meets the eye.