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The A-Z Of Scottish Football Corruption And Scandal Part Three

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This is the third part of my A-Z of SFA corruption, and this one covers the reign of Stewart Regan, Lord Nimmo Smith, Campbell Ogilvie, George Peat and the McLeish appointment. This is, indeed, a genuine list of The Horribles.

Oh yeah, and on top of that I cover sectarianism as well.

The SFA has given us all serious causes for concern over the past decade or so.

They are perhaps the most scandalised body in all of sport. This A-Z is almost complete; one last instalment will see us tackle the Victim and Survival lies, the casual racism in Scottish football and the courage of one good man who stood on the Hampden steps and told it true.

How can one national association have so much dirt swirling around in it?

Other FA’s don’t get this. Doing an A-Z of their worst mistakes and scandals would be impossible.

This is a depressing list to have had to make up.

I’m glad I’ve just about done with it.

N is for Nimmo Smith

The most grotesque stitch-up, the most corrupt verdict, the most scandalous whitewash in the history of football; this was our very own Widgery tribunal. A crime had been committed but there were no guilty parties, and the full story was kept just off the page. Indeed, the guilty paraded their way through the tribunal as if they’d set it up, and they were basically allowed to write their own version of reality. Everything about it stank and still does.

For openers, the SFA was allowed to interfere in the process in a way that was completely unacceptable.

They were supposed to be the appellate body but their own decision to let Sandy Bryson testify and to allow Campbell Ogilvie to speak, as well as helping to limit the scope of the inquiry itself by having the Wee Tax Case folded into the big one helped to keep the association itself out of the mire.

The whole thing was a scam.

Bryson’s testimony still defies belief, which is why he got his own segment of this A-Z, but no less perverse was the final verdict which is that LNS acknowledged that the club had lied, it had with-held registration paperwork and it had engaged in a tax scam to win football matches … but that, in fact, the whole thing had not conferred any “sporting advantage” and so there was no case for stripping the tainted titles.

It still astonishes us today.

The incredible thing about the LNS scandal, of course, is that it was all a scam from the beginning. Because we now know that the shameful Five Way Agreement gave them a blanket immunity by guaranteeing that title stripping would not occur. The whole thing was window dressing. The whole thing was a fraud.

The LNS inquiry is one of the running sores that continues to haunt the game. It was not real justice and nor was it ever intended to be. It was designed to trick us into believing the governing bodies were serious about giving us the fairness we were entitled to.

O is for Ogilvie

Mr Conflicted himself. He was President of the SFA when the governing body “discovered” that Rangers had concealed documents for years. But he was also at Ibrox when this process began; in fact it is his signature on the bottom of the piece of paper that set EBT’s up in the first place.

Ogilvie was more than aware of what was going on.

This guy should never have risen as far as he did; his success in the SFA is a testament to how rancid the association was. Regulations expressly forbid anyone being on the board of one club and holding shares in another; whilst he was a director at Hearts he had a holding in Rangers.

He later passed then to his wife, which was also against regulations.

The EBT scheme for which he was responsible – the Discounted Options Scheme – was the first brick to fall out of the wall at Ibrox. HMRC identified that scam early in the day and they sent a tax bill to the club demanding payment. They had discovered the “side contracts” although the club had denied they existed. Rangers own lawyer recommended that the bill be paid; they had been caught red-handed and everyone involved knew it.

Is inconceivable, then, that Ogilvie could have been in ignorance about those self-same “side letters” which the club had concealed not only from the tax man but from the SFA. He was Vice President of the association at the time, and knew the club was in breach of their rules.

By the time he moved up the whole world knew about EBT’s.

The Discounted Options Scheme haunts them to this day. It is the subject of the Resolution 12 case, and Ogilvie didn’t just know of its existence but brought it into the world. He is no longer at the SFA, but he still has his company pension and the scandal of his tenure stills stinks out the corridors of Hampden.

He has never been asked the hard questions those events demand of him; he would probably not be honest with us if he was.

P is for Peat

As bad as Ogilvie was, and as toxic for the game, but for the EBT scandal he would actually have been a fair better – and perhaps even fairer minded, on the surface anyway – than the man he replaced at the helm of the organisation. George Peat was a disaster from start to finish and his rise to the top of football in Scotland is an indictment on how backward and self-serving the SFA is. The old “blazers brigade” ran things for far too long.

Peat ought never to have been near the SFA Presidency.

He started his journey up through Scottish football at Airdrie, a club he helped drive to the wall.

Their liquidation was an outrage he should never have survived. Yet he somehow found his way onto the board at Stenhousemuir; that was necessary if he was to maintain his climb, as without a club he could not have continued to serve on the SFA board. Of course, regulations stipulate that anyone who was involved in such an affair could not serve on a Scottish football board … that was completely overlooked.

To understand this you have to understand that for decades the SFA has been run as an old boys network, with the same faces moving up and helping their mates along the way. There was never real transparency about the process; the succession was planned well in advance, and those who were pegged for the senior offices were hand-picked for the jobs.

It was a time when moving up was predicated on how many years you’d served.

That kept the same people in charge year on year, with only their positions changing.

In no other organisation could a man like Peat have succeeded. At the helm of the SFA we continued to stagnate as a national side – he appointed both Burley and Levein – and accomplished absolutely nothing to credit him. And we would all have mercifully forgotten his existence, and been glad to do it, had he not reared his ugly head last week to spin a conspiracy theory and pose a question everyone knew the answer to.

His biases and preference for Rangers was well known all the way down the line, but his shameful posturing and anti-Celtic agitation of that time, and during the referees strike, was well known. He offered to cancel that season’s Scottish Cup Final to help his favourite club without even bothering to ask their opponents Queen of the South.

His entire tenure disgraced the nation.

It was farcical. Instead of being deeply embarrassed by him the BBC stuck him on the telly last week as if the game had a single thing to learn from him except how its senior officials ought not to behave. Shame on them as well as him.

Q is for Quitters

When Gordon Strachan left the Scotland job the SFA spent months fumbling about trying to find a way to get Michael O’Neill to take the job.

He wouldn’t. They then turned to a short-list of two; Walter Smith and Alex McLeish.

Both men have something in common, above and beyond being former Ibrox managers.

Both quit the Scotland job for something better once before.

We actually went crawling back to two men who had already chucked it, when they had exactly zero interest from anywhere else in the football world. Desperate stuff, and clearly a sop to angry Sevco fans who wanted “one of their own” in the job after Strachan went.

But these two?

There was nothing at all to credit either of them. Smith at least had the good grace to say no; he knows when a job is too big for him and that one was.

Any job would be too big for a guy who’s football philosophy was old in the 80’s.

McLeish was never going to turn it down; he is sitting on an EBT time-bomb and his SFA salary will come in handy when the taxman chaps on his door. He hadn’t been involved in football since he was fired by Zamalek – after just ten games – in 2016. His time at Notts Forest ended even faster; they got shot of him after just seven games in 2013 … he won one.

In much the same way as the media had already become a repository for out of work Ibrox players, the SFA now fulfils a similar role for their out of work bosses, it seems.

But what made this episode especially egregious is that neither man should the slightest loyalty to the country or any appreciation of the honour of being national coach before … and they were both offered the chance to take the reins again anyway.

R is for Regan

It is amazing to me that Stewart Regan lasted as long as he did.

He should have gone in 2012 when he and Neil Doncaster talked the game into the gutter in 2012, with Regan actually saying that a failure to get Sevco into the leagues would result in “civil unrest”; an astonishing piece of fear-mongering and grandstanding which made Scotland sound like an uncivilised backwater.

This guy started so well. He refused to give in to the referees when they threatened to go on strike.

He made sure Dougie McDonald and Craven were seen off the premises.

He fired Hugh Dallas.

For the first time ever it seemed as if we had a guy in that office who we could work with.

But as time went by, it became clear that Regan was a bigger threat to the integrity of our game than any of those who had come before us.

And he was the one who would have killed it stone dead had he gotten his way.

After the scandal of 2012, he went into overdrive trying to protect his “legacy” when it was already in ashes.

He refused Celtic’s demand for an inquiry into all that happened on his watch and he finished up involved in the farce that I talked about in the previous section. His failure to appoint O’Neill after a months long pursuit was shocking and humiliating for the whole game, but worse was the mess he left behind him.

He has not one legislative achievement to his credit.

He made Gordon Smith look like a success.

He was a gutless fraud who treated fans and clubs with absolute contempt.

He talked down the commercial viability of the sport to an extent that was breathtaking.

He sabotaged the very department was meant to be in charge of, and left the whole association mired in a scandal that has never gone away.

He is the worst person ever to hold the post.

S is for Sectarianism

One of the biggest scandals in the history of Scottish football is also the one they most hope will go away; sectarianism.

It takes many forms and it’s been around forever.

Whether it was one club have a No Catholics signing policy or the litany of bigoted chants that have come out of various stands over the years, at various clubs, the SFA never once took seriously their responsibility to deal with this issue. They wanted to ignore it, and they did.

Eventually, UEFA stepped in to deal with it and issued warnings and sanctions. The SFA still refused to act. So lax has the association been that the government stepped in to pass a law. They are threatening the passage of another.

Sectarianism is still rife in Scottish football; one club – the Ibrox one – even stirs it with the way it behaves and some of the public statements it makes.

Getting the governing body to sort it out is something we stopped hoping for long ago, and where they fear to tread politicians have trundled in with big feet.

The media is even worse.

If they never had to mention it again that would suit some of them just fine.

Many have made a career out of being deaf, or seeking some kind of moral equivalence between our supporters and those elsewhere who obsess over being up to their knees in blood.

It’s the problem that will not go away no matter how others might wish that it would.

For a brief period of time, after The Famine Song, and when UEFA really stepped up their campaign against it, it seemed that it might be on the wane … but listen to the crowds at Ibrox and watch the video of Hearts fans last week.

It’s back with a vengeance.

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