Res 12 : Broadfoot, Conn and the Compliance Officer

Whilst not going anywhere near far enough into looking into the events surrounding the granting of a licence to Rangers which allowed them to compete in the UEFA Champions League back in 2011, at least the SFA are asking their compliance officer to look into it.

Lets hope he doesn’t miss anything.

Lets hope he can find that letter from HMRC that clears everything up…

You know, this one… cited in a Guardian article by David Conn on august 5, 2016;

The argument is that in breach of Uefa rules against clubs having overdue tax payable, Rangers owed £2.8m on a discounted options scheme following a successful HMRC challenge known as the “wee tax case”.

The SFA is adamant its committee which considered the licence dealt with the issue thoroughly and received the necessary evidence the tax was not overdue according to Uefa rules. One informed source involved with the issue at the time, who did not want to speak publicly owing to continuing criminal proceedings against Whyte arising out of his tenure at Rangers, said that at the initial deadline, 31 March 2011, HMRC had agreed that the £2.8m did not need to be paid until after his May 2011 takeover.

Before subsequent 30 June and 30 September deadlines, Rangers, by then owned by Whyte, are understood to have told the SFA they were in discussions with HMRC over the money owed. Uefa rules allow tax not to be treated as “overdue” where there is a written agreement with the tax authority for payment to be extended.

The SFA, although declining to disclose details of the documentation it received, citing confidentiality with its member clubs, told the Guardian via a spokesperson: “The Scottish FA has always been clear the licensing award issued to Rangers in 2011 by the licensing committee was correct. The process is audited on an annual basis by Uefa.”

Uefa, pressed on the issue again recently, said: “The licence for the 2011-12 season was granted by the SFA and there was no reason for Uefa to doubt this decision.” 

No one seems bothered by who at UEFA said this.

I am.

And also who at the SFA cleared the application.

Again, I am.

Uefa has said it has no need to investigate further if the tax was in fact overdue according to its definition, because after that season, Rangers’ fate anyway equated to a sanction for breach of the rules: they could not play in European competition for the following three years. HMRC, taking a stern view of clubs defaulting on tax, declined to approve a company voluntary arrangement with creditors and Rangers went into liquidation. The assets bought via a new company, Sevco Scotland Limited, Rangers were not accepted into the SPL, and the SFL insisted the club had to start from the bottom, in the third division.

That informed source…one wonders who it could be..

And if the SFA do have this unpublished communication, why bother investigating ?

Why not just publish ?

Surely Conn  himself would have asked to see it, to verify its existence before going on to claim its existence ?

Isn’t that what journalists do, even if they work for the paper which pulled the initial Resolution 12 advert, for whatever reason they felt was fit ?

I bet I’m worrying about nothing and the Guardian are about to run an exclusive from Conn that clears the whole thing up….and dismisses any ravings from the Resolution 12 guys that there were any sort of shennanigans at all…

Lets tie that in with the source who gave Grant Russell the Traverso (UEFA ) letter which stated that as a new club “rangers ” couldn’t compete in Europe anyway, and  punishment for them was inappropriate.

Russell, as we know, published a slightly different version of that letter, claiming he received it direct from Traverso as a result of his questions on the issue.

Which, again, as we know, is bollocks. Otherwise he would have reminded us of that correspondence.

Who told Conn about the unpublished HMRC letter that absolves the SFA of any wrongdoing ?

Conn must be surprised that the SFA are investigating something that they told him was all tickety boo, and will no doubt come out and remind his readers, and the rest of us, that he was assured there was nothing to worry about.

Whats the point of having these connections in high places if all they do is ingest laxatives and stand over you with their legs wide apart ?

Surely when he was asked by the Offshore Game to verify his story, then he would have backed it up ?

And perhaps,as the Offshore Game pointed out in November 2016, even forward this information to the Nimmo smith commission, where it appears not to have been considered..

Following the publication of the Offshore Game report earlier this year the SFA told David Conn  that the federation was well aware of the ‘Wee Tax Case’ and was in fact in possession of further documentation that showed that the club had been given time to pay by HMRC, which meant that the club would be allowed to play in Europe under UEFA rules (that explanation in itself is suspicious, given further evidence available to the report writers, but is not the subject of this article).

The problem was that in the end, Rangers never did pay, and HMRC pursued the club for repayment through the courts, which was a significant cause of the club’s later bankruptcy proceedings which triggered the Nimmo Smith commission.

This raises the question, if the SFA knew all about the “Wee Tax Case”, and in fact had even more documentation about it than anyone else has seen, why did they not alert the Nimmo Smith commission to this?

Daryl Broadfoot was director of Communications at the time, and its logical to assume he was, er, directing communications.

Hey, there’s another thing-given that the SFA received a copy of the Traverso letter, why didn’t Broadfoot put Russell right on a few things ?

Such as the contents of the letter ?

Or did he give him the edited version that appeared in the STV report which “finally put the new club myth to bed ” (paraphrasing ) .

In January 2017, Daryl Broadfoot announced he was leaving the SFA, just a few  months after the Conn article.

Thankfully, he’s back on the scene now, working in PR.

One image he could work on is his own, and maybe lend a hand to David Conn, who could do with a wee credibility boost.

All they have to do is dig out that letter….