Tuesday 8 May 2012

Abusive Power Corrupts Absolutely


The decision has been made that, like the criminalised banks, Rangers FC are too big to fail.

As we posted yesterday, the outrage that Rangers will be allowed to continue (probably without ANY penalties) in the SPL will come to pass.

There will be no future points deductions.
There will be no continuing transfer embargo.
There will be no return of stolen trophies.
There will be no payments to creditors.
There will be no tax for the HMR&C.
There will be no convictions for fraud.

Rangers, in their omnipotence, refused to even attend the meeting of the SPL clubs yesterday to decide their future - they were in the Six Counties raising money in a friendly against fellow bigots Linfield FC...
... they did not need to attend as their negotiating position is being enacted to the letter by the SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster.

Doncaster is the equivalent of the Premier League's Richard Scudamore - the man makes up the decisions as he goes along, backing up his public stances with alleged legal opinion masquerading as legal advice.

Doncaster it was who announced firstly that the Rangers Newco entity did not have to reform in the lower leagues (the norm in such instances).
Doncaster it was who announced that the SPL has been given legal advice which says no points penalties could be imposed on a team re-entering the league in Newco form.
Doncaster it was who arbitrarily announced that there would need to be 5 objections to this reformation - as Rangers have a certain degree of control over five of the other SPL teams, this is a done deal.
Doncaster it was who persuaded the clubs to put financial well-being ahead of footballing integrity.

Doncaster: "I think that is entirely unfair on the owners who are concerned with the survival of their clubs..."

But...
... the clubs are only in financial straits because of Rangers abuse of the league, the cups, the transfer market, the betting markets and their ability to siphon off money from corruptions like throwing the Zenit St Petersburg UEFA Cup Final to continue to fund their illicit practices.

Ewing Grahame in the Telegraph: "There is, of course, some irony in a club who owe money throughout Europe for players they have signed but could not afford and who are being pursued by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs for unpaid tax in the region of £90 million postponing a vote on this issue... This may give succour to Miller, who is so excited by his potential purchase that he has never visited Scotland. His reasons for wishing to own Rangers are unclear and it is not yet known whether or not he has any connection with the club’s discredited owner, Craig Whyte, the man who holds the floating charge over Ibrox Stadium and the training complex"

That will be the same Craig Whyte who used to run commercial projects with one of the administrators, Paul Clark.
And then there are rumours of Alastair Johnson in the background and, more criminal still, "the shadowy figure of Andrew Ellis has been a mostly unseen presence but he hasn't completely vanished from the reckoning yet."

Below are quotes from two lifelong Celtic fans on this massively corrupt situation (from kerrydalestreet.co.uk).
Fans across the remainder of the SPL are against the Doncaster Scam but they matter little.
The likes of Scudamore and Doncaster wish to get rid of the true fan and replace with the gullible, the addicted consumerist, the prawn sandwich, so that they might be able to continue to prise open illicit revenue streams without anything so discomforting as public scrutiny.

"Why pay any money to go and watch what is essentially a team following the rules versus the WWE XII whilst the rest of them sit back counting their 30 pieces of silver and wiping the sweat from their brows at the realisation their gravy train nearly came off the track? You would be subsidizing theft from our own shareholders and - by acquiescence - legitimising the biggest fraud in the history of football in Scotland."

"I always knew we were being cheated -- we all did -- but a great part of the joy of following the club was to be successful in the face of the sectarian cheating bastards. Bent refs and linesmen could disallow only so many goals, after all, and we continued to win trophies, though not nearly as many as we should have done, given the quality of the players we kept on producing. But there is a difference between knowing we were being cheated in the sense of being discriminated against, and finding out that the whole sport has been weighed up and formulated to make sure one team ALWAYS wins, which is what we now know to have occurred from the day and hour David Murray took over Rangers. We now know that the football authorities wilfully turned a blind eye when Rangers borrowed unsustainable amounts of money from a compliant bank -- financial doping -- in a desperate attempt to equal our two greatest feats. They achieved one of their aims. But if the rules of the very sport itself are now changed or ignored to facilitate the re-emergence of this disgusting, dead entity then I am done. This will be beyond cheating. This will be corruption on an industrial scale. If Celtic fight to face these bastards down, as Bob Kelly did in the Fifties, Big Jock did the Sixties, and MON did in the Noughties, then I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my beloved club. But if Celtic abstain or, unthinkably, vote for commercial reasons to allow this travesty to take place, then I will walk sadly into the night. I don't have that much time left that I can afford to waste it on wasters."

But we should expect nothing from certain characters at Celtic.
Pseudo-club agent John Colquhoun liquidated his music industry company with half a million pounds worth of debts and reestablished the company on the following day under a different name...
... with no debts and no creditors.

Although Rangers are criminalised beyond reconstruction, the tactic of ripping off the masses for proprietary financial gain is the modus operandi for influential individuals across football (Colquhoun is very close contractually to new England manager Roy Hodgson, equally close to Craig Levein and gambles on match outcomes professionally, for example). 

A Sham and a Scam.
A Disgrace.