More than three weeks after hearing the Notice of Complaint about the UEFA licence issued to Rangers (IL) for the 2011/12 season the SFA are keeping very quiet about the issue.
It’s hardly a surprise from the organisation that announced in September 2017 that the Compliance Officer would investigate and waited until June 26 to host the hearing.
There appears to be some negotiating behind the scenes over what date to start investigating on with the preference to leave it until May and pin all the blame on Craig Whyte.
Is Rod McKenzie, SPFL lawyer, suggesting neither SFA nor SPL were made aware of a major investigation into Rangers by HMRC? He’s full of it! pic.twitter.com/6wkJxLJl5K
— Rangers Tax-Case (@rangerstaxcase) July 27, 2017
Here is absolute proof that the SFA knew of the tax investigation. They were served a Sched 26 notice to produce all RFC contracts in 2009. pic.twitter.com/11WhBUSsI2
— Rangers Tax-Case (@rangerstaxcase) July 27, 2017
The screenshot above is taken from the FTT transcript day 5. It was read out in the tribunal that the SFA knew.
— Rangers Tax-Case (@rangerstaxcase) July 27, 2017
A similar exercise was used by Bill Nimmo Smith who side stepped the SPFL request to review contracts from July 1998 when the SPFL started up. Nimmo Smith opted to look at contracts from November 2000, after Ronald de Boer and Tore Andre Flo had been enticed to Ibrox with Discount Option Schemes that weren’t declared to the SFA or SPFL. Guilt had already been admitted, reluctantly, on both of those contracts.
For the 2011/12 season the licence cycle began on 31 March 2011 when Dave King, Alastair Johnston and Andrew Dickson were on the Ibrox board or held committee positions within the SFA. Dickson sat on the licence committee but appears not to have been heavily conflicted in the eyes of former Chief Executive Stewart Regan.
As early as November 2010 alarm bells were going off at Ibrox about the overdue tax on the Flo and de Boer contracts, the club had been forced to finally admit their guilt over players signed a decade ago. This was admitted in evidence at Whyte’s trial last summer
HMRC had their evidence, it came to light when Ibrox was raided in July 2007 on request from the Metropolitan Police investigating dodgy transfers including Jean Alain Boumsong.
If the SFA didn’t smell a rat at that stage a Schedule 36 notice from HMRC in 2008 should have did the trick.
Internet bampots knew from Day One that Craig Whyte was more of a naughty boy than a low-profile billionaire.
Celtic shareholders have provided ample evidence, if the SFA aren’t prepared to finally do the right thing the only avenue left open is for a fraud and crime investigation to be opened by City of London Police.
Would the SFA really want that to happen?