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.
