Further Twist In The Sevco Prosecution Reminds Us That The Costs Continue To Mount.

Earlier in the week, the website of the Scottish legal community, ScottishLegal.com, carried a story that was truly remarkable, and eye-popping. David Grier, of Duff and Phelps, has voluntarily withdrawn his complaint about the conduct of a Scottish judge, Sheriff Lindsay Wood, on the grounds that he does not believe it will be taken seriously here.

Instead, he’s refiling it in England and with the European Court.

Grier has already sued successfully sued the CPS for malicious prosecution. He has been joined by several others who claim that the CPS purposefully destroyed their reputations by sending them to court on the back of cases based on evidence which was obtained in various underhanded, and even illegal, ways by a Scottish police force more bent on revenge for what happened to Rangers than they ever were about any concept of justice.

I wrote about this last night in the lengthy piece I did on how Celtic fans have it right on the issue of refereeing reform, but you have to take a step back from football at times and look at the bigger picture. This is what the bigger picture looks like.

Grier alleges that Wood, who had a framed photo of Ibrox in his office and even held a number of shares in the dead club, signed no fewer than 22 separate warrants in the cases involving the club and those Police Scotland was determined to prosecute, many of them on resting on shaky foundations or on no foundations at all.

The article says this; “One warrant even allowed officers to raid the offices of London law firm Holman Fenwick Willan, which was later found to be unlawful and executed “without proper safeguards”.”

A complaint against this guy should be a slam-dunk.

But Grier filed his complaint some time ago and has heard nothing to convince him that his case is being progressed. Having decided that the Scottish judiciary will look after its own he is taking his complaint where it might be treated more seriously and where there is no cabal of like-minded people covering for one another.

This is a remarkable story and deserving of a much longer article, and I’ll get to that in due course. But for now it should serve as a reminder of the lengths some people will go to on behalf of the club they love – a nice segue into a new stage of the debate on refs.

It’s also a reminder of how great the social and financial cost of this has been and of how that cost continues to rise. Between the EBT scandal itself, the failed prosecutions and the legal cases which has resulted from them and for which many of those who stood in the courts have been compensated lavishly, we’re well into the hundreds of millions here.

Hundreds of millions folks, and it all started so that the first diabolical Ibrox club and its egotistical chairman David Murray could win football matches.

It’s quite a story, and the greatest scandal in the history of British sport … and we’re still nowhere near the end of it.