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Why supporters can’t be cheated again

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Last night on the popular fans forum Kerrydale Street the fine detail of the EBT years was summed up by one contributor.

Barcabhoy appears across various social media outlets and has an inside track on the business side of the ‘game’.

The survival myth is one of the greatest crimes committed against the paying supporter over the last few years with not one club or official in the whole of Scottish football prepared to put the truth out there.

Administrators Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan have bonus payments tied to commercial and revenue targets and are unlikely to let any notion of Fair Play get in their way.

Running parallel to the survival myth is the Nimmo Smith enquiry which changed the terms of it’s remit to slide away from the Discounted Options Scheme used to recruit and pay Tore Andre Flo and Ronald de Boer.

If the remit given to Nimmo Smith, to investigate from July 1998 instead of moving on to November 2000, had been followed he’d have been looking at two contracts that the club finally admitted to were tax scams. HMRC were denied £2.8m plus interest and fines.

Last week the Supreme Court heard the final appeal against the EBT’s used to recruit players and buy trophies to the detriment of every club in Scotland.

Contract details weren’t given to the SPL and SFA putting the club in breach of the rules other clubs play by.

Nimmo Smith again moved the goalposts to focus on the tax view on those payments claiming that the EBT scam was available to other clubs.

Under Dave Murray Rangers cheated every club in Scotland, soon we’ll find out if he also cheated Her Majesty.

If Murray is guilty on both counts, no matter how reluctantly they are to act every result involving every player needs changed to a 3-0 defeat.

The debate then moves on to whether trophies are simply stripped or redistributed.

If the SFA and the SPFL, which is the member clubs, wish to turn a blind eye ‘for the good of Scottish football’ only a reaction from season ticket holders similar to that of 2012 will save the tarnished image of the Scottish game.

On Kerrydale Street Barcabhoy stated:

I think all involved will find it much easier not to consider title stripping than actually do so. By the time such a decision would be made we’d probably be winning or have won our 49th title and we’d automatically become Scotland’s most successful club considering they’d have won 48 outright and 1 shared (presuming the stripped ones weren’t awarded to us).

The outrage at such an act from both the media and the hordes is not something anyone would want to take on. The best we can do to punish them for their impudence is to win 10 in a row (or more) and overhaul the 54. That wouldn’t be satisfactory to most here but I think it’s the best we’ll get.[/quote]”

What Murray did wasn’t “Imprudence”

It was out and out cheating , and it went on for over a decade

Secondly “it’s the best we’ll get ”

We aren’t getting anything. Nothing at all .

The cheating has gone unpunished, Murray has not had a sanction imposed on him or even had a charge to face. That’s a scandal. I don’t want any title awarded to us, although there is a case to do so.

I certainly though don’t want the records to show that the titles were won by a club who’s owner engaged in long term cheating to win those titles.

Why should Rangers be any different to Lance Armstrong , Juventus or Melbourne Storm. A cheat is a cheat and they can’t be allowed to get away with it.

I don’t blame the players, it really is little to do with them . Murray though knew exactly what he was doing and why. For Titles and financial gain. This wasn’t incidental benefit. This wasn’t some kind of unintended side effect. It wasn’t an accidental consequence

It was the entire purpose behind the use of EBT’s . To cheat, and more so to set out to cheat because Murray knew that he had to lie to HMRC and to the SFA and SPL .

In 2006 on this forum , I made what is generally accepted was the first comment anywhere on Rangers use of EBT’s and the need to have them investigated. The reason i commented then was because I was offered EBT’s for my business. I knew that in some settings they MAY be legal, but not in the setting where you had to provide side comfort letters .

Those letters were to persuade your employees that they could benefit from avoiding tax , but if there was a problem the company would pay the tax and they would never have to repay the loans.

I declined to use them as they seemed nothing more than a dodge which had deception at it’s core. My Finance Director said exactly that to me when he reported on what had been offered to my company . I doubt that any responsible finance director would not have waved a red flag all over these and even if he had been bulldozed by a headstrong and reckless Chairman to use them, he would insist on a provision on the balance sheet in the event it went wrong.

None of that happened at Rangers . Although they did go through a number of finance directors who left on a fairly regular basis.

So spare me the notion that it’s not something anyone wants to take on. It’s something we have to take on. Every club should take it on. Many clubs were cheated , not just Celtic. Many clubs lost £ Millions in prize money, because they were honest and played by the rules whilst Murray’s Rangers cheated their way to prize money and titles and were left with only the Winner Casino coupon to show for it.

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