calscot

Fair enough. I only skimmed Leggo's post as he puts far too much propaganda stuff in them these days.

I fear financial doping of the SPL to gain an advantage over SFL teams.

I think the point is that there is a legitimate use to cover your arse in case you end up getting the wrong end of the stick, compared to completely making up a story that has a tenuous relationship to the truth to further your agenda - be it to disparage a party or to sell newspapers, and using it as a get out clause. Which is which and to what degree is subjective, but the distinction is worth pointing out.

Depends how you see that. If you see it as a criminal taking over a "vulnerable" (due to HMRC investigating a legal loophole) company and running it to the ground in 9 months to fill his pockets then does that really count? Hardly seems fair to me.

I still don't think that would be fair. I think like any judgemental body, HMRC should have a limited window of opportunity to take people or entities to task over technicalities. If HMRC had come in and complained after the first year, we would have stopped and owed a couple of million total. You can't let people think they are doing nothing wrong for years and then backdate it. It's just not right in any scenario. The only exceptions I can see, is if it's blatant criminality. There is no other scenario where this backdating is considered ethical. In fact in some laws the opposite applies. If you move your fence into your neighbour's land and they don't complain for ten years - the land becomes yours. Using that type of thinking we should be able to use EBT's in perpetuity. Most other debts are statute barred after six years and using this rule, we'd have owed about four years worth or about £10m. But the biggest problem is that HMRC created a loophole that was based on "intention" which can't be proved. They then let you apply the loop hole for 10 years without complaint and then after 12 years decide that they "know what you were thinking" and ask for the accumulated money back plus double in interest and penalties. If we did that, it would be considered extortion and probably criminal.

I disagree. Rangers ended up in administration due to the threat of unaffordable fines and interest that resulted after they spent what they thought they could afford using what they thought was legal at the time. Completely different to knowingly overspending then going into administration.

What an intelligent response... Maybe you need to look past your nose and realise there are points of view other than your own.

I'm presuming most people know about Penn State's punishments for covering up child abuse in their American football college programme. http://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/x1510839923/Penn-State-pays-high-price-for-scandal In administering what was termed both punitive and corrective action, the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Monday correctly slammed Penn State University, through its football program, for â??reckless and callous disregard of children.â? We commend the NCAA for its swift and appropriate response to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Its action comes one month after Sandusky was found guilty of 45 counts related to child sexual assault, and revelations of an independent investigation that several top university officials were aware of Sanduskyâ??s actions but did nothing to stop them. Those officials include former president Graham Spanier and the late coach Joe Paterno. And if the NCAAâ??s actions werenâ??t enough, the Big Ten Conference on Monday doled out its own list of sanctions. While Penn State avoided the NCAAâ??s â??death penalty,â? which would have banned the football program from any competition for at least a season, one could argue that the penalties were in fact much harsher. Included were: A $60 million fine, which is equivalent to the average gross annual revenue of the football program. These funds must be paid into an endowment for external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at the university. A four-year football postseason ban and five yearsâ?? probation. Vacation of all wins from 1998 through 2011. ---- Now imagine Celtic were retrospectively given the same punishment. That would mean a £38m fine now and about 8 years of trophies stripped from 1966 to 1974 which would wipe out 8 of their 9 in a row, 5 Scottish Cups, 5 league cups - and of course their European cup win. Maybe we should campaign to have their trophies stripped...

I don't get Leggo's arithmetic. If you get 10% for 1m then the club is worth a total of £10m. Seems fair enough. Now add in £5.6m and the club should now be worth £15.6m. With me? That means £5.6m is worth just under £38%.... For just 50% you'll obviously need £10m. For 51% you'd actually need about 10.41m. Kennedy is over £4.8m short for that extra 13%.

I think we saved about £2M a year with a turnover of over £50m. With star players on something like £20k a week it means we possibly could have afforded a couple less - or about five bit part players in a huge squad which we hardly used. Who knows, maybe we just wouldn't have signed Flo... However, SDM was spending money with profligacy and could possibly have spent just as much and then paid back another £20m in the share issue. Or we could have been say £35m in debt instead of £14 last year which would have been difficult but manageable. The fact is that we saved about £23m but have now lost more than that from our squad and will lose more than that again by being in div 3 and more than that again by being banned from Europe.

What have the SFA been doing to protestants? That's a bit of a weird one. I'm more bothered about what they are doing to Rangers and will leave the CoS to sort out any discrimination against them.

What £75m? You're saying we didn't pay £75m of taxes? Where do you get that from? As far as I know, we didn't pay about an average of £2.3m a year for ten years in taxes as we "accidentally" thought we had a workable tax avoidance scheme. The rest was in trumped up interest and penalties. I can't believe how people fall for the guff from the media; really, if you're a regular on here you should be a bit more on the ball. How was it deliberate? Did Rangers deliberately evade tax while publishing this action in the accounts? The whole point of this is not what Rangers actually did, it is whether the payments were notionally discretionary or obligatory. That fact alone shows how stupid the tax laws are, and the point is that it can't actually be proven one way or the other without using some kind of mind reading. What will happen is someone will decide what they THINK is the probable case.

I don't quite get this but do know that appeals to higher courts require a lot of time, money and appetite for it. And there is court after court that just won't get it. You just have to look at what happened with us with UEFA - they appealed against themselves. You don't have to be paranoid to be wary of not getting justice. I looks that way and it's not too surprising. We in competition with 11 other clubs, our only realistic rival has been indoctrinated since birth to want our demise, the rest have no chance of winning the league and often get a doing on the park from us and called "diddy teams" which is just an infitesimal fraction of what causes them ill feeling towards us and yet despite us having about 1/3 of the fans, they get 11 votes about us while we get 1. Not only that, you're average fan is not well known for his objective thinking on his rivals and yet the chairmen supposedly listened to the fans for their votes. Add in the fact that Celtic fans threatened to boycott them and you get the scenario where if they vote for us and we are voted out, not only do they lose the TV money and our fans at their games, they also lose the Celtic fans at their games - add in a boycott from their own fans and they'd be facing armageddon. It seems to me best to play safe and vote us out as it looked like that was what the rest were going to do. Damn right we stood alone. That pretty much seems a fact. We went into administration and were deducted 10 pts, had a poor run due to players not being focused and negotiating 75% pay cuts, then went into pre-liquidation which meant we were banned from Europe for three years and lost most of our players for nothing, we were then voted out of the SPL and demoted to division 3, were fined the maximum amount and given a transfer embargo - and yet our associate body claimed we hadn't actually been punished yet as these were just natural consequences. Damn right we have no recourse to natural justice from our associate body. What legal justice is there from the courts when you agree to abide by the rules of your association which give you sanctions that are not within they powers, lose this principle in court and then use other rules which state that they can do what they like to re-enforce that sanction? Just how can we get justice from the courts. When a body has rules that state, "as they see fit", just where is your case? Damn right we have no legal justice. Public opinion is manipulated by the media and the most of the public we are talking about are rival fans or not really interested and already have the opinion that football is bad. To sell papers, reporters print sensationalist stuff instead of facts and measured opinions. That much is obvious these days and there is no national newspaper that has any integrity in how they present the news. Add to that, that it's generally considered by Rangers fans, with very good cause that many in the media are of the sympathy to the club that bitterly hates us and motivates them to act in ways that are highly unprofessional as well as many others who have sympathy for smaller teams enjoying seeing the mighty fall and you've got an incredible antagonistic media storm. Damn right that public opinion has been turned against us through propaganda. The SPFA only care about the rights of their richest members to earn as much money as they can. They have demonstrated that time and again with total disregard for the good of the rest of their members. Why would they help us? They just put the boot in by helping and encouraging our players to leave for nothing. Damn right we're cut adrift from them. I can't see the others being interested. Alas that is what seems to be happening. It seems you are writing this sarcastically in jest but many a true word said in jest. You don't have to be paranoid to be caught in a perfect storm. You just need to be in a world where your rivals, who don't like you, are able to decide your fate when you fall and are helpless, at the same time when everyone else either doesn't care or only cares about themselves. It happens all the time in small groups where one person ends up being ostracised. It's a natural occurrence that doesn't need much coincidence, just a bit of human nature. Some of the less hateful are sated with their attacks and probably bored. To continue to sell the media they have to change the tune after a while. If they are genuine, shouldn't they be apologising for their part in the kicking we got? You would need a conspiracy for you to be right here but the point is there IS no conspiracy. Just hens at a pecking party (copyright One flew over the cuckoo's nest) or sharks in a blood frenzy. The rest requires a conspiracy theory but you're original scenario which fits very well, just doesn't need one.

The plot would be tedious, repetitive and in the end sound incredulous and contrived. It would be about as believable as Duval's A Shot at Glory. It would lack light relief or build up and release of tension and just fill the audience with frustration and then let down by no up beat ending. It's a weird old story with plenty of twists and turns and full of villains, but it's really not a compelling one.

I can't see how that can be applied to Murray, although it's obvious with Whyte. But then the cause and effect is that they gave us Whyte - and should a club's company be liquidated for one season of one man that they opened our door for? Murray did not deliberately withold money, he just used an HMRC tax rule for something it wasn't really designed for.

In fact the more I think about this, the more I think we should apply to England. We have to go begging bowl in hand and say, "Scottish football is dying, please give us a helping hand, take us in and help us survive." The unionist politicians should be all over it - it could nip the independence vote in the bud.

Really don't get this two team thing - especially one that's in the country which are basically your international football rivals. Every penny spent in England is a nail in the coffin of Scottish football. I live here and couldn't bear to support an English team. Seems to me to be a slippery slope that will end up with most Scots having an English team as their first choice and casually supporting (read "looking out for the results for") a "diddy" Scottish team as they are local. We're heading for a league of Wales but without the two big teams in the upper English leagues. In fact thinking about that it seems probable that Welsh football will be far better and richer than ours. Swansea and Cardiff will soon dwarf the Old Firm if they don't already.

Great and very relevant example.

Where is the sporting integrity of not allowing us pre-season games?

Here's another example, Celtic fans don't think Larsson ever dived, Rangers fans do. Do you think Celtic fans would be happy for us to decide whether Larsson dived and retrospectively lose any title where he is found guilty? If Larsson didn't ever dive then what do they have to fear? I very much doubt they'd go for it.

There is always plenty to fear from letting your enemies decide whether you are guilty. Would you like Celtic fans to decide whether we are a "new club"? That's what's happening on Wikipedia. To me it's obvious that we're the same club but with a new parent company, other clubs around the world have been in our position and not been consigned to history on that site. I think we've all been shafted in the past when we knew we were innocent. Last year I had my car hit by another car who overtook me while I was turning right - totally her fault but she completely lied to the insurance companies saying I pulled out on her when I was actually well established on the road. Without witnesses I ended up getting the blame - and that was agreed my insurance company who did not have an agenda against me. The case in point is a strange one of perception - it's not about the payments themselves, it's about if you subjectively think they were contracts. The fact is that it's a minor technicality that should have been brought to light at the time and even if found guilty should result in a minor censure - the fact that they are talking about stripping our titles shows the extremity of agenda against us. Would you say put yourself to a trial by your enemies where if you are found guilty of a technicality in their subjective view, that your hand will be cut off? I really doubt it. I think you would refuse and risk the whispering of possible guilt instead. We may even be guilty of that technicality but the punishment does not suit such a minor crime when tried 12 years later. It's incredibly extreme. Sorry but I do think it is incredibly naive to think that if you are innocent then you have nothing to fear from a trial by your enemies. I think that people really have to get it sorted about what exactly our crime is and whether an odd, badly worded email is enough evidence to prove us guilty. What you also don't seem to get is that because people don't have a clue about what we've done but already see us as guilty of something heinous even though they can't explain it, is the reason we were kicked out of the SPL. Fans thought we were guilty of something that was obscured by phrases like "sporting inegrity", "financial doping" and "buying players they couldn't afford" and the clubs voted us out because they couldn't think for themselves.

If you put a leading person in the stocks for doing little wrong, the public will always take delight in throwing rotten tomatoes at them.

I knew someone would come up with this and I actually tried to pre-empt it in the post - obviously I was too subtle. If you're council removed your door while you were away and you were burgled - you'd only blame the burglar? I suppose it wasn't quite removal of the door but HMRC created a situation where we were so desperate to keep our house we were threatened to lose that we actually invited the burglar in thinking he was going to help. HMRC basically handed us to Whyte on a plate and we got shafted by him and then they put the nails in the coffin. They also got shafted but don't care as they have their example. The point is the government is not supposed to behead some citizens for a technical offence as a deterrent for others - not in a democracy. They have not acted ethically in the slightest. None of what they did sounds even a wee bit fair. But you want to ignore that and blame a con man who took advantage of the situation. We know what Whyte did, but he is a bit part in a far larger game.

HMRC seem to have escaped any criticism and punishment for their actions which have cost the tax payer tens of millions and put the whole of Scottish football into crisis and possible meltdown. Some will say they were entitled to do what they did but to me that akin to saying a bully is entitled to beat you up and take your lunch. Surely, as a government body they should have extra responsibilities for their actions and for the good of all the home nations? After all they have thought about this aspect to let banks off with tax and then prop them up with tax payers money while the banks continue to flaunt the rules and ethics to make as much money as they can. Seems to me that IF Rangers have not been perfect in their accounting then HMRC have at best been negligent in letting it go without complaint for 12 years which gave Rangers the impression that they were within the rules. Surely that is being negligently complicit and should be taken into account? I can't see how a company which is pretty much also a pillar of the nation should be callously put into such a vulnerable position with threats of hugely inflated tax invoices it cannot possibly afford and publicly refusing to consider alleviating the possible tax burden by negotiation. This allowed the company to be taken over by a man of low ethics who stripped it bare and deliberately did not pay tax that was due, thereby leading to HMRC putting the company into administration and with the refusal of a CVA, into liquidation. The strange thing is that all along, Rangers thought they were playing by HMRC rules, so how can the government office justify such a tough stance. The repercussions are still propagating and could force a whole important section of society into a massive depression - imagine the outcry if this was the arts instead of sport? The irony is that HMRC through a catalog of negative actions have already cost the taxpayer at least £35m and with the withdrawal of much of the funding to Scottish football could also lead to a further reduction of income to the treasury especially when you consider other clubs could go bust and therefore also companies that supply them or rely on them. Perhaps there is a good reason and upside to this extreme damage to Scottish society and the public purse that will benefit us in the long run, but it is very difficult to see and in I can see none at all. It's a bit like them coming along and complaining about an error in the paper work of the keystone of an important bridge and making sure it is removed without thinking of the consequences. You may think that Rangers itself deserves this for wrong doing but that also looks like a fallacy as the club's actions were not obviously nefarious - they published their accounts every year in full view for anyone to see. They took top financial advice in order to something that reduced tax - something which every company and self employed person in the country does. It just seems that Rangers played by the rules but not quite in the full spirit of them and so HMRC decide in petty revenge to create a situation where they are removed from existence and thereby lighting the touch paper for the devastation of Scottish football. It is a hell of a lot to be responsible for in the pettiness of their actions - and for what gain? Heads should roll - but amazingly, nobody is even pointing the finger.

PS I can't see how you can have any court run by people with a total conflict of interest. It's like taking two feuding families, decide to convene a court on one of them and choose the judge and jury from the other. How does that work as justice?