Official site - Lindsay Herron

[BEARGER 1,829]

CHARLES GREEN has often made the point that things happen quite differently in Scotland and you can see exactly where he is coming from.

 

The vindictive and often hateful campaign waged against Rangers in the past year or so has certainly opened the eyes of many who have had a peak into our insular little country.

The fact that this campaign was baseless given the Tax Case result going the way of the Murray Group last week merely exacerbates the point.

There was scarcely a broadcaster, pundit or columnist who differed from the view that Rangers had been â??cheatingâ? Scottish football for a 10-year period over the usage of Employee Benefit Trusts.

And, of course, there were a few agenda-driven bloggers whose vitriol at times was quite extraordinary.

Worse than that, the Scottish FA and the Scottish Premier League tried to force Rangers into accepting the stripping of five league titles among a raft of sanctions in order to gain SFA membership in July.

Of course, they might yet try to take that ultimate sanction because the SPL have not called off their investigation in Rangersâ?? usage of EBTs and how they may have affected playersâ?? contracts â?? despite the court verdict.

Across the border in England, they do things differently.

As I wrote in this column before, invariably when a club gets into financial trouble the Football League and indeed the FA do their bit to try to help them recover rather than seek to batter them into oblivion.

Itâ??s the same with tax matters. Did you know that 15 English Premier League clubs were being chased by HMRC over the non-payment of tax on image rights contracts?

Image rights allowed a club to pay a portion of a playerâ??s wages in exchange for using their image to promote the club and their sponsors. Payments were made to a separate company, often based offshore, and taxed at a lower rate or not at all.

HMRC insisted the system was being abused by clubs, particularly at the lower end of the league, allotting an unrealistic proportion of their payroll to image rights.

Interestingly, instead of launching investigations into each of the clubs with a law lord at the helm, the FA Premier League decided to broker a deal with HMRC.

Indeed, they successfully came to an agreement with the taxman and it turned out Chelsea paid the most money in the shape of £6.4million.

The strange thing is that the man running the SPL, Neil Doncaster, is familiar with the workings of the FA and the Football League because he worked for both of them.

As Chief Executive of Norwich City, he was appointed a director of the Football League in 2006 and subsequently joined the FA in 2008 as one of the FLâ??s two representatives.

Indeed, he was working for the Football League when Leeds United transferred ownership from oldco to newco when a CVA failed in 2007 and was party to the decision to allow Leeds to remain in League One.

As Charles Green says, strange things happen in Scotland.

[der Berliner 3,363]

There have been a few of these rather "open", blog-like articles by him on the club's home page. You wonder how long the SFA and SPL take before complaining.

[the gunslinger 3,366]

i wonder if hes really the one writing them.