In November 2014 Neil Doncaster couldn’t be more emphatic about clubs dodging tax payments.
Livingston had owned up to being in arrears with their Income Tax payments after some discrepancies emerged in how previous owners had been paying players.
Bonus payments had been made that didn’t go through the books with HMRC questioning the club.
Livi were hit with a £10,000 fine and five point deduction which dropped them into the relegation zone.
Explaining the decision Neil Doncaster told the Daily Mail: “The tax default and reporting rules are an integral part of maintaining a fair league competition.”
Having discovered yesterday that a former club had denied HMRC of almost £47m over a decade of sustained tax cheating Doncaster seems to have lost his conviction for an integral part of competition.
With an extra tax free bonus Livingston incentivised their players.
Rangers (IL) took that a stage further.
They recruited and retained players with the promise of wages going into a trust fund to avoid the Income Tax and National Insurance that their opponents were paying.
Yesterday a nameless SPFL official issued a bland statement in the hope that the issue would go away.
After Celtic’s statement yesterday there hasn’t been a single comment from any other club, not even Livingston.
With almost every club unconcerned by a decade of cheating they may find that Celtic fans are more reluctant to fill their coffers after the punters were treated like mugs for a decade on a playing field that was loaded in favour of one club with no respect for Her Majesty.