Ten days before the transfer window opens The Herald has claimed that Peter Lawwell is about to pick up a ‘bumper £2.3m Hogmanay bonus’.
Senior Reporter Martin Williams is the author of the piece and has a long history of imaginative use of facts, in June 2012 he explained to readers about the death of Rangers through liquidation then later came up with phrases such as engine room subsidiary to avoid a very uncomfortable truth.
Deep into the Lawwell article is is explained that the ‘bumper Hogmanay bonus’ covers two years- £1.4m for 2018 and £890,000 in 2017 on top of his annual salary.
Those figures come from record breaking turnover largely driven by participation in the Champions League group stage which saw turnover reach £101.6m for the year to June 2018. Detail of the payments was included in Celtic’s annual report published in October.
The bonus payments comes from the ‘long term performance plan’ which was introduced by the in-house remuneration committee consisting of fellow directors.
Lawwell has been chief executive of Celtic since October 2003, during his tenure the club has suffered massive losses of income due to the governance failures of the SFA and SPL.
Up until Craig Whyte took over from Dave Murray in 2011 the old Rangers club fielded ineligible players due to secret payments being made to offshore trusts, these payments were declared as disguised remuneration by the Supreme Court in July 2017.
Celtic lost the SPL title to a club fielding ineligible players in 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2011 which meant a consequent loss of income from the Champions League. Celtic’s 2013 turnover was up £24m on the previous year due to playing in the Champions League.
The SPL fined the old Ibrox club £250,000 for a decade of fielding ineligible players, since then other clubs have had results reversed into 3-0 defeats for fielding ineligible players.
In September 2017 Lawwell called for a full investigation into governance matters but this was rejected by former SFA chief executive Stewart Regan who explained that he didn’t want to rake over old coals.
Herald readers have still to be informed if Dave King transferred £19m into a UK bank account by 5.30pm last Friday as promised to Lady Wolffe at the Court of Session..
