One voice notably quiet during Celtic’s horrendous season has been Chairman Ian Bankier.
In normal circumstances the Chairman of a club would be heard fairly regularly, at Celtic Brian Quinn and John Reid were certainly visible, commenting at key moment and showing a genuine interest in the direction and welfare of the club.
Since 2011 Bankier has been Chairman of Celtic, outwith the AGM it is almost impossible to find him comment on what has been a very dramatic decade at the club.
Joining the board as a non-executive director in June 2011 he became chairman four months later just at the time Celtic were questioning the SFA about the UEFA licence awarded to a club whose outstanding tax bill had required a visit from Sheriff Officers on behalf of HMRC.
In the summer of 2012 the Five Way Agreement was created for a new club to join the Scottish Football League who then supported the Survival Lie that they had won 53.5 Scottish League titles.
Bankier and the Celtic board sat in silence, raised no concerns and didn’t even protest when an SPL enquiry into the use of ineligible players for over a decade decided not to overturn a single result.
During the 1990s Dave Murray managed to extract £1m from a variety of fat cats in order to sit in the Directors Box as an associate director, an utterly pointless title. For their money they got to travel to away matches and enjoy the perks of the succeses created by Murray’s special relationship with the Bank of Scotland, who almost forced Celtic into administration in 1994.
Bill Thorburn fell for the Ibrox sales pitch with Burn Stewart, the firm that he was Chief Executive of, forking out £1m to give him a seat in the Ibrox Directors Box and the chance to press the flesh in the hallowed Blue Room.
Tonight Journalist Phil MacGiollabhain uncovered the gushing delight of Managing Director Bankier over putting in £1m from company funds so that his colleague Thorburn could share the after-glow of the Murray Revolution.
In August 1995 The Herald reported:
Burn Stewart’s managing director, Mr Ian Bankier, backed up Mr Murray’s view that the associate directorship was a good business move for his company.
Mr Bankier said: ”We have had an association with the club for a long time and that association was the platform on which the success of the Scottish Leader brand has been based.
”We have had a box at Ibrox since 1989, have had trackside adverts at the stadium, and our products have been put into the stadium bars. The invitation to become an associate director was to Bill personally and the company put up the money to pay for it because we believed it made good commercial sense for us to do so.”
With Bankier the Chairman of Celtic the Old Firm brand looks to be in very safe hands.
