So there we have it. Despite Rangers acting on legal advice at the time, and despite TWO previous hearings finding in the club’s favour, HMRC have won the ‘Big Tax Case’ against the club’s former owners.
As it stands at the moment anyway.
If, and it is a big ‘if’, this is where it ends, then no rationally minded person can say the club hasn’t done it’s time so to speak. With the concept of natural justice being turned on its head, Rangers were already found guilty by Scottish football’s kangaroo court years before it finally got a legal result in its favour.
We were subsequently hung drawn and quartered. Left to the mercy of rapacious wolves, the club also found itself on the wrong end of fines, illegal transfer embargos, prize money withheld and sent to the bottom division in the country. We lost a title wining team, millions in revenue and now receive a pittance in TV monies – the irony being the club’s own fan base is the largest contributor to this particular pot! Enough is enough.
Those who continue the bloodlust even now must be rendered as certifiable.
That said, given the surprise at this latest result by some legal tax experts as well as the two previous findings going against HMRC, it is not beyond the realms of possibility this process has still some legs in it. With this in mind, it would be prudent to reserve judgement. There is still the distinct possibility the club has been the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice.
Not that this will matter one iota to the torch and pitchfork brigade who have already crawled out from behind their rocks, foaming at the mouth and whipping themselves up into a morally just Rangers hating frenzy –again.
No, when Rangers are in the dock, sound objective thinking goes out the window in Scotland. What matters, the ONLY thing that matters, is sticking the boot into Rangers. The two previous hearings were dismissed at each stage by thousands of ‘tax experts’ around the country, as was the Lord Nimmo Smith Enquiry which cleared Rangers of cheating to win titles. Fans and journalists alike continued the onslaught regardless, by and large ignoring the legal findings of the time. Now that one has been found which suits their Rangers hating agenda- all of a sudden the legal view is binding, valid and final.
This latest exercise in duplicity is typical of the double standards relentlessly applied to Rangers.
Down south, no one batted an eyelid at the fact some big clubs such as Arsenal used EBT’s. Maybe we Scots are just more morally minded than our English counterparts. Drilling down not too much deeper we find this is patently NOT the case.
When Aberdeen’s millions worth of debt was written off, it was described by BBC Scotland’s Jim Spence as a ‘wonderful day for Scottish football’. So a club operates for years beyond its means, is then let off the hook and Jim Spence thinks this is ‘wonderful’. No moral indignation there then. Nor was there for Hearts, a club actually lauded for how they run their business, despite stitching creditors for tens of millions. Others such as Dundee Utd, Dunfermline, Dundee and Motherwell have also used players they effectively never paid for. Not a hint of dissent anywhere.
If we were to make null and void the results of all those who used players they effectively couldn’t pay for we would be wiping most Scottish Premier League records from the last twenty years off the map!
Then there is Celtic. For decades, Celtic Football Club announced attendances that were ludicrously low to anyone inside the ground. Goodness knows how much the taxpayer lost out with this skulduggery. The same club incidentally which covered up child abuse perpetrated by its staff. (I do not mention this to score points, but to illustrate the basic unavoidable fact-the moral compass only comes out the pocket of many in this country when wrong doing or alleged wrong doing involves one particular football club - Rangers)
If we were so ethically minded, then one would think we’d have nothing to do with a tournament which is up to its neck in corruption on a global scale. But we will, and more than that, will be champing at the bit to be at the next World Cup....Scottish Football is NO paragon of virtue.
One is logically left to conclude that this latest bout of mass handwringing by Scottish football fans in general, Celtic fans in particular and of course some of our ‘friends’ in the media, is (for the most part) nothing to do with morality, but is everything to do with bigotry, envy and a pathological hatred for Rangers Football Club