The trickle of allegations that Rangers failed to properly register football players has turned into a flood. Today’s Daily Mail is the latest to run the story, with evidence from former Rangers director, Hugh Adam, that offshore payments to players “weren’t included in the contracts. They definitely weren’t.
“That was the whole point of them. If they’d been included in the contracts, they would have had to have paid tax on them”
“All the directors heard about them but didn’t take them seriously because they didn’t appear in the books.”
Mail reporter, John McGarry, writes, “Adam’s revelation suggests a clear breach of the SFA rulebook – and is a potential embarrassment to current SFA president Campbell Ogilvie, who had a 27-year association with Rangers, many of them spent as secretary.”
Despite being implicated in potentially the most serious scandal in the history of Scottish football, Ogilvie remains in place as SFA president and is one of the few who will be issued with the private report into Rangers, due next week.
Although it is thought Rangers started their Employee Benefit Trust in 2000, Adam told the Mail he believed a scheme paying players off-contract was in operation from the mid 1990s.
I would like to be the first to congratulate Motherwell FC for winning the Scottish League, Premier Division, in 1995.
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Tell all the huns you know,
That they never won nine in a row!
Their contracts were wrong,
They knew all along,
They never won nine in a row!
Morning all
Paul67 – In my opinion what this has done is virtually guarantee liquidation. If somebody did somehow step in and prevent them from being liquidated, then when all of this stuff is proven, they better have VERY deep pockets as they will be sued into oblivion for loss of earnings.
Remember we won’t just be talking about Celtic or other Scottish teams here. They have been playing incorrectly registered players in European competition.
This is about as bad as it can get.
And may I be the second to congratulate Motherwell.
The end is nigh
Beware the ides of march
Havingapartywhenthehunsdiex csc
Tell all the huns you know that they never won nine in a row! Their contracts were wrong, they knew all along, they never won nine in a row.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Hail hail
Paul67,
I think you deserve this scalp which should only be a matter of time in coming, well done in your pursuit of this villain.
How am I supposed to cover my colleagues work today as well as my own?!? Don’t Rangers realise the damage they are causing to the UK Economy?!?
HH
bdb
I’ve long been an advocate for burying them and burying them deep.
Who would have thought they would have done it themselves?
Paul67 – do you “think” Celtic will use this knowledge to impress on the SFA/SPL the need for fairness and clarity in judgement and to insist that newhuns (because oldhuns are dead) start in the lower leagues where all new clubs should begin?
It’s my birthday today and i thought the Breaking Bad DVDs Mrs.Sixtwo gave me were the best present i had received.
Mr.Adam may just have changed that…….
Congratulations also to the ‘Honest Men’ of Ayr United on their CIS Insurance League Cup win in 2002.
what worries me about the ugly bunch and reading the bile they come out with is…
will the police and authorities keep them in check???
we know what they are like when a tele doesnt work.
id say keep them alive, in a coma mind, to save them
spilling onto our streets. because, if not its gonna be carnage.
reading the posts on FUNbag FUNbag that people
post on here, they really think that it is
someone elses doing.
they really are thick as…(fill in your own)
the silver lining????
none whatsoever. after the latest revelations (to them, not us)
scotland will be cast from all uefa and fifa competitions. guaranteed.
just ask our man on here with links inside uefa.
Strip them of everything they won during that time. Celtic as well as all other SPL clubs, past and present, should demand action from the SFA and if they don’t produce the goods go to UEFA.
Already posted this a few minutes ago.Roddy Forsythe was on BBC Radio 4 here in London ( the equivalent of ” Good Morning Scotland ” ) this morning outlining the troubles at Ibrox and how today was quite pivotal.
He also went on to outline how ” the SPL needs Rangers “. A simple statement to the listening BBC public.No attempt at moral judgement or perspective but simply creating the impression that Rangers had somehow or other got themselves into a spot of bother,somehow it needs fixing because Scottish football needs them.
If you tell the big lie often enough many people will come to accept it as fact.
Trouble is Roddy,the game is up.Cheats,liars,bigots,bullies.Justice is coming…….. can you here it?
Here is a delicious snippet from FF. The guy who all through the fakeover was giving 100% spot on info says the same source has just told him that unless there is firm and credible notes of interest in purchasing Rangers Football Club by 17th March, Duff & Phelps will begin liquidation proceedings on the 20th March.
Paul67
This would be astonishing if true. Would you hold any hope of anyone at the SFA confirming any of this in the future?
Get ogilvie out!! If he was in any way involved at rangers during the period the SFA are investigating then there is no way he can be involved with the SFA in any way.
SFA president Campbell Ogilvie MUST RESIGN TODAY.
He is now a busted flush.
sixtwo,
Happy, official, Birthday. Everybody else Happy Birthday.
the picture i’ve had in my head of the cannibal sitting eating his own foot, has now reached the stage, were he’s up to his knee….. how apt!!
PC67
Ayr United – 2002 CIS Cup Winners
Things I never thought i’d see!
also…why does no-one on r. clyde ask the players football assoc exec who appears on their show and was a member of the rangers squad during their crooked contract participation if he had a double contract???
ah. right. i think i see now.
How the blazes am I supposed to stay off drink for another five weeks?
We’re gonna need a bigger schadenfruede
Paul67, great,great news yet again, do you estimate that action from UEFA will be speeded up now as the SFA are not up to the task at hand.
KTF
Paul 67
As you described near on a week ago ….that’s why you called it quick news!!!
Now that this is in the open…. What’s the chances of discovering that there was also other payments made to another party to facilitate league winning…referees maybe????
Hail hail you bunch of jelly eating good thugs
Ramie
roddy forsythe…lol
he cant even get the current season right in his latest journalistic piece.
another funbag funbager.
I think the chances of any newco Rangers slipping back into the SPL have just about disappeared now. Any re-badged team would have to be completely new in my opinion, no history, no titles, and not even having ‘Rangers’ in the name.
A clean start in the lower leagues is the only way to go, if they insist on coming back that is.
A sign of the times
Published on Saturday 4 July 2009 19:29
IT was only 20 years ago, but the public reaction to Rangers’ capture of Maurice Johnston seems astonishing in our more enlightened age, reflects Andrew Smith
SOMETIMES AN event from 20 years ago can seem to belong to an entirely different age. When it comes to Maurice Johnston signing for Rangers on 10 July,—– 1989—–, elements appear straight from the most ancient, primitive times.
The backdrop to the move retains a power to take the breath away that the passing years will never dim. But the bone-shuddering shock is no longer provided by the boldness of those at Ibrox in making Johnston their first high-profile Catholic of the modern era. Nor the fact that this never-to-be-topped transfer came only eight weeks after the striker had appeared to rejoin his former club Celtic.
What causes eyes to pop now in reading contemporary reports surrounding the most sensational signing in the history of the Scottish game is the reaction to Rangers manager Graeme Souness and owner David Murray ending the club’s discriminatory player policy. Or institutionalised bigotry, to be more accurate.
On the do-you-remember-where-you-were day to dwarf all others for Scottish football followers, burning Rangers scarves and burning season books outside the stadium were the visual snapshots of burning religious hatred stoked by Johnston’s arrival. Yet, the sectarian sentiments expressed freely on the player’s 1.5 million switch from Nantes now seem altogether more inflammatory than any minor fire raising.
“Why him above all?” said David Miller, general secretary of the Rangers Supporters’ Association. “It’s a sad day for Rangers. There will be a lot of people handing back their season tickets. I don’t want to see a Roman Catholic at Ibrox. Rangers have always stood for one thing and the majority of the support have been brought up with the idea of a true-blue Rangers team.”
It was supposed to be only a lunatic fringe of the Rangers faithful that indulged in such bile. But it was a fringe with a real force of numbers, comprising punters from as far apart as Larkhall (“It is a kick in the teeth to Larkhall” said one member of the Loyalist Supporters’ Club) and Dalkeith. In a pub in that town, the poison spewed forth. “I’ve been a Rangers supporter all my life but that’s me finished with them. I am never going back, never ever. Rangers have no right signing Catholics,” said John Potter. His friend James Smith claimed Rangers had been “sly because they made sure the season-ticket holders had paid and then they signed him”, while another of their group Frank McKay presented an odd defence of the club’s religious apartheid. “It’s wrong if you are a Catholic or anyone else, but it’s not wrong if you are a Rangers (fan] . It’s part of the magic of supporting Rangers.”
From the distance of 2009, what is remarkable is not that people held such views in 1989, but that they felt at liberty to air them in public forums. In the years since, the Rangers owner has talked about the need to remove a “stain” on a club he had been running only seven months before breaking with a tradition that dated back to the 1910s. Today, though, Murray is reluctant to overplay the significance of a transfer that undoubtedly did chip away at sectarian divisions.
“I can tell you that, first and foremost, it was a football decision,” he says. “To partner Johnston with Alistair McCoist gave us the best possible strike partnership. We signed the player because he was the best Scottish player around, and that is what mattered. Of course, it removed a cloud that hung over Rangers and with the passing of time you can see from our record that there is no consideration of colour, race or creed in who we sign.”
Murray isn’t interested in being presented as some noble crusader. Neither, however, will he have any truck with the notion that he was an opportunist, who jumped on the Johnston trail when it emerged the player was complaining about contractual difficulties within days of being paraded at Celtic Park on 12 May.
“The transfer wasn’t courageous, brave or bold, it was just the right thing to do. Anyone who knows me, or knows Graeme, would know how offensive it is to suggest, almost, that we were willing to forego the religious side only to get one over on Celtic. It wasn’t about one-upmanship. Of course, we always want to beat our opponents, but that wasn’t what was behind this. I made the decision based on business sense.”
Just weeks before he was unveiled at Ibrox, Celtic paraded Johnston in front of the press as a 1.2m record Scottish signing – signalling his return from Nantes, the club he had left Parkhead for in the summer of 1987. The first signs that the deal was in trouble came when Celtic refused to meet tax payments. Johnston began to harbour doubts about a move he himself had initiated – crucially, without the help of his agent Bill McMurdo, then persona non grata at Celtic. After overtures by Souness to McMurdo, initially only days after he had been pictured in a Celtic strip, Johnston decided to “break down religious divisions” and earn the “Judas” tag from a spurned Celtic support. There are, though, problems with this version of events. It overlooks the fact that twice during the saga, FIFA, having seen the papers signed by Johnston – who inked two separate documents days apart – and the SFA both ruled that the player’s contract with Celtic was legally binding. Indeed, two weeks after he joined Rangers, FIFA fined Johnston 3,000 for “unsportsmanlike behaviour”; and said they “deplored” Johnston’s activities.
Yet the perception of the Celtic board as bunglers was cemented. That remains a bitter post-script to the episode for then Celtic chairman Jack McGinn. “In what sense could we have been said to bungle, I always ask myself?” he says. “There are a couple of indisputable facts in this case. We agreed a fee with Nantes, and signed a contract with the player that both our own governing body and the world governing body verified was legal and binding. We are laughed at for following the rules while the player is lauded for cheating. I’ve never understood that.”
Johnston seems to have taken cold feet on the Celtic deal almost the instant he signed a letter of intent: what we now call a pre-contract agreement. And this despite his gushing about his “homecoming” in the boardroom of Celtic Park with some immortal lines.
“When I joined Nantes it had always been my intention to return to Celtic one day, although that seemed unlikely at one stage given the circumstances surrounding my departure,” Johnston said. “No one can accuse me of being two-faced because I’ve always maintained that stance since then. I didn’t want to leave Celtic and I don’t intend to now. There was some rubbish about me wanting to join Manchester United. But it never entered my head to play for any other club. In fact there is no other British club I could play for apart from Celtic.”
That afternoon there was also a memorable nod to his future – by a matter of weeks – employers. “I enjoyed playing against Rangers, but when I left I was unhappy about the fact that in games I’d played against them, Rangers were winning four matches to three. That’s something I intend to remedy next season,” he said.
Johnston did remedy his success rate in Old Firm games – by scoring three times against Celtic. He did so because McGinn and his board elected not to pay the 800,000 balance on the transfer of a player who “had no desire to play for the club”. Two years ago, the Celtic manager of the time Billy McNeill said he felt let down by his board because he had implored them to see through the deal.
“There have been a lot of red herrings thrown out about this affair,” says McGinn.”When it came to making the player ours from the July, all that we could have done was put him out of the game. No doubt, after a lengthy legal case. What would have been the point in that? We would have been dead in the water if we had sold him on to Rangers for more money. That would have been our 30 pieces of silver and we would have been the ‘J’-word our supporters called him.”
By that McGinn means Judas. In recent years Jesus’ betrayer has been somewhat rehabilitated, forgiven for his actions. It has only taken 2,000 years. Will it be as long before Johnston can expect the same for his part in a religious epic?
Thugs =ghuys….classic iPhone fail
With so many other clubs now due some silverware the investigation will only gather momentum and support from all across Scotland. I thought this couldn’t get any better but it has!
Paul
Does anyone have any idea where this is going to end?
As you rightly put it. This watershed is now a flood
I cant wait to see Brian Dempsey outside on the steps of Hampden park
” the game is over………..”
Monaghan 9.35
I’m in exactly the same position – this is going to be a HARD Lent! In fact, it’s just no fair!!!
Paul 67
Should the 1994-95 season not go to Hibs?
They dropped 8 pts to Rangers, Motherwell only dropped 6 pts.
Adding those points, Hibs end up 1 pt ahead of Motherwell.
If this is true re contracts. How much a of a leap is it to suggest the mib have been nobbled ?
Naw we are all paranoid? Aren’t we?
Mtt
Well done to Mr Adam and all involved. Now we know for definite what many of us have been arguing fir some time – they are cheats. They broke the law of the land and the rules of football to gain an unfair sporting advantage.
And it all goes back further than we thought. Does that mean the final bill could be even bigger?
This is the final shot through the head of a decaying corpse. There is no way back now. And the sooner that death is pronounced the better.
Ian Archer was spot on all these years back. Scotland will be a much better place without them.
A number of non-playing staff will also be released. Rangers do not recognise trades unions other than PFA Scotland so the non- footballing staff have no representation.
From today’s Herald. Dear oh dear. What a mess.
Listened to Synde last night and heard a caller talk about Agent Whyte only doing what needed to be done to save Rangers. He said White all along was going to stiff HMRC for up to £75m and would eventually be regarded as a hero by the RFCiA fans, but Whyte could not tell everyone this as it would have alerted HMRC. But because of on field events such as failing in Europe his hand had been forced. The caller seemed to have no qualms whatsoever about stiffing the taxman for £75m (his words) as long as RFCiA came out the other end debt free. Unbelievable arrogance! Did the so called experts raise the morality of this. No, they seem to think this is acceptable as well otherwise they should ask their callers is it acceptable to stiff the taxman and babbled on with the usual rubbish.
Happy birthday sixtwo. Monaghan: Save all the pennies for a Magnum of Champagne. I know I am :o)
Busted Flush In Administration.
What a brilliant start to the weekend.
Thanks again Paul67 for bringing a big smile to a Tottie Tim
Hail Hail