GirondistNYC

I would not be shocked if Lawwell did what Some others have already indicated they'll do and bought into the old paradigm. But I would be surprised. June is not February. Things have changed. To assume, for the sake of argument, everything P&B says about Celtic fans is true: we are glory hunters. That's us, right, gloryhunters? If we are, then wouldn't we love, absolutely love, the chance to walk into the pub wearing a Barcelona jersey and loudly declare - "I was a Celtic fan, but I was so appalled by the way they caved to Rangers that I switched to a romantic rebellious team I already supported that happe ns to have Lionel Messi". Please don't dismiss the sentiment out of hand. If I had a fiver for every poster on here who said "if Rangers gets back in, I'm not paying 30 quid to watch pish, I'll go watch juniors/local 3rd division side/Wim Wenders movies" I could buy Rangers with money left to have a marble facade on the Aldi I'd build on Ibrox. This is a universal sentiment about Scottish football. If we are seen to collaborate, people aren't going back to Parkhead. Captain Sensible types will say its all down to fickle glory hunting. Green Brigade types will say its a protest against societal oppression. I'd say it will be legitimate outrage at the betrayal of the better angels of our clubs nature. Truth is probably in the middle. Lawwell sees money lost more than money gained if he is smart.

It's 4:30 in the morning here, I've had a very strange night to begin the long US weekend and I was about to either go to bed or post something about how baffled I am by seemingly suicidal actions by the Gers collective. But to answer your question, no, we are nae fucking happy. If after all this Silence Celtic colludes with them I'm done with Celtic. I'm guessing announcing a talk with Celtic is scorched earth last throw of the dice shit. If you hang for the EBT lamb, why not steal the SFA and FIFA sheep? And if you hang anyway, why not force Celtic to declare their intentions? Not a bad play, if you're desperate. Publicly force Celtic to make the cash versus integrity decision over the weekend, and make it clear you want to talk directly to Lawwell. Thing is, Lawwell has to know now that any commercial gain from a cozy OF deal is as nothing to the backlash from the Celtic support. If he wanted to cut a deal to keep the old order with better terms for us he needed to manage the process and speak up. Now is too late, because now we smell blood and see something more mportant than a transfer embargo. Now we see ourselves not shackled to the corpse of Rangers and the corpse of the Old Firm. If Celtic collaborates with Rangers than we are what you say we are. If Celtic collaborates with Rangers their season tickets go Grrek debt levels of down. If Celtic collaborates with Rangers they can go to hell or Connaught, and I'm going to Bundesliga 2 and MLS. Hail (conditional on actions) Hail (sorry, did I mention it's 5am here and....errr....sorry for the rant)

As someone who watched bout 2/3rds of St. Pauli's games over the last two seasons (and has the avatar to prove it) I absolutely, categorically and without reservation condemn this suggestion. No. Nae. Never. Nicht. Suggest wee little crab flute guy inside coffin instead.

They have failed to find the linkage between RTC and Joseph Kennedy's attempted assassination of Churchill as of yet, but it's only a matter of time. Don't get the reference?! Don't understand why Joe Kennedy is relevant? Read Leggat! TODAY! It's fiction! But then it always has been!

They are perfectly entitled to a court of law - its just be doing so they will violate the core rules of the organization and be subject to further and extreme penalties thereunder. It's only when an exterior court makes a binding ruling that the rules of the organization are against the actual law that exterior courts trump: the Bosman case was one example, your "no blacks allowed" would be another. But courts generally would prefer not to get involved with this stuff. FIFA and UEFA have excellent reasons for this approach, btw. Civil courts are SLOW. If someone was to civilly challenge relegation in glacial Italian courts you might not get an answer by the end of the next season, let alone the upcoming one. Football is also global - what happens if Spartak fans attack Milan players in Moscow and UEFA awards the game to Milan- should a Russian court be able to challenge this decision? Chaos would follow.

No need to discuss the signing policy for Rangers NewCo III (VB 1690) until they are allowed into the pyramid nd the embargo is either lifted or deemed not to apply to splinter clubs,

Huh? Are you implying that the decision of two SFA tribunals will somehow be undermined by the payments made to football players and agents (presumably players and agents unconnected to Rangers and thus unconnected to the judgement they are challenging)? Are you saying the tribunal members are "players" who have been corrupted and tapped up? Are you saying that the COS case will turn into a broad no stone unturned investigation into Scottish Football? Did you and Sammy knock off work at the garage early and hit the vodka? Since the SFA is applying its rules, not law, the only basis to appeal is that the SFA doesnt have the power to punish. If the SFA doesn't have the power to punish then neither does, by implication, the EFA and DFB. So Something like the Hertha - Dusseldorf playoff result could be appealed all the way through the German and European Court system. Given that football judgements need to be made in a timely fashion and civil courts are generally slow, this doesn't work. THAT is why FIFA and UEFA hat recourse to civil courts: you can't be waiting on a court docket to decide if Juventus or Hertha is in the top league.

Potentially lost in all the witchfinder loyal muppetry from VB, cockwombles, Hearts statement and legal charge of the light brigade towards the SFA valley of Sion is: 1) Bill Millers lawyer indicting the SPL had ample evidence of second contacts 2) a source corroborating what Daly implied but didn't show: Side letters with regular payments and a per gme bonus It becomes harder and harder to evn make theoretical arguments that Rangers aren't guilty from a tax and a footballing perspective. Maybe the legal appeal to the transfer embargo indicates Rangers knows this and is going to employ scorched earth high risk tactics from here on out, Expect Sandy Jardine to be reprising his loving tribute to the end of the Pink Floyd the Wall film somewhere close soon.

This is what I don't get about you at all. You do a gloating report based on the VB investigation and say RTC is named and "shamed". When somebody expresses concern about nutters you blow them off. Then you admit Vanguard Bears are nutters. Vanguard Bears are by some instance the most unpleasant thing I've discovered during this saga. They really seem to think that they are the continuation of their namesake, William Craig's Vanguard movement. The tone of their official pronouncements sounds more like a political movement clinging to the edges of legality than a fan group. All those veiled threats! All those promises of purging the support in due time! All those Stasi like twitter avatars with "enemies beware - vb is watching". They're vile entertainment. However, it's hard not to think that maybe, just maybe, theses clowns have steel toecaps under their oversized shoes and might inspire something really nasty. Yet No.8 is happy to parrot their half-assed investigation. The thing I don't understand about Rangers Supporters in general is why you hate Rangers Tax Case. It was correct. If you had listened to it you would be in less trouble. It's fairly objective about the situation and compared to most blogs involving the old firm it's tone is sweet reason. Hating Phil I understand, he really does hate you and let's his bias get in the way. But RTC? Should you be thanking him, not hounding him. You'd be just as fucked if he never existed, you'd just be starting from a state of utter ignorance when the blow came.

This. And they would probably expect a Celtic backlash and underestimate diddy sentiments based on the media spin. Best approach is to hoist bears on their own petard. Write politely that you find RFCs appalling and it effects your idea of he product, but bring to their attention that Rangers fans are themselves the boycott-happy ones and heavily factionalized - do they really want to be associated with a Rangers NewCo when a Rangers NewCo will be represent a problem and be owned by people a segment of fans won't like. If they boycotted SFA sponsors who gave cash to Rangers, might they not boycott the sponsors behind the wicked asset strippers who have mishandled their club and betrayed Ra Peepul? I'd also think that the more boycotts that are thrown around, the less money is in Scottish football as a whole regardless of what happens. It would be a shame if everything worked out, Rangers went to the Third but all the sponsors reduced payments on the theory Scottish football fans can turn on you and thy might as well back the Rugby.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but you may want to spend some time reading the Rangers Tax Case or Scots Law blog. This stuff is complicated and there have been some very smart dedicated people doing the groundwork in untangling this for a long time. The Bears are stuck floundering trying to figure this stuff out from first principles and based on imperfect information because they think these sites are part of the great Opus Dei/Aberdeen/SNP conspiracy but there is no reason for the rest of us not to save some time and do a bit of directed research before posting. It never hurts to check out informed alternative views like Hillier's as well. Informed posts are also more likely to piss off No.8 when he is in Mr. Hyde mode!

Well, she was comprehensively outacted and upstaged by a midget sitting on the shoulders of a mute guy.

Might Wimbledon AFC, the poster child for cleansing sins through fan driven progress up the pyramid, be slightly annoyed as well?

Three things rather than two: 1) correct fom an accounting perspective 2) legal from a tax compliance perspective 3) in compliance with SFA and other football rules Bears keep saying that because their accounts disclosed EBTs it's automatically okay regardless of anything else out there. That's simply not true. It's not true it's even a point in their favor unless the footnotes to their financials said "We paid X in compensation to players and staff through EBTs. Such compensation was governed by separate documentation outwith the regular employment contract and could be construed as payment in lieu of wages". The only way they can even make an argument everything was is disclosed and HMRC is being mean after the fact is if they actually disclosed the key facts relevant to the EBT legality/second registered player contract point, They didn't. It's a bollocks argument.

Oh FFS. Yesterday you yourself were saying there were no dual contracts. For months Bears have been clinging to hope that no side letters would be produced and the players would hold omertà. The more clued in ones probably realized thy existed but hoped they had been shredded, but either way it raised a tiny possibility of a win in the BTC and would have made it very easy for the SPL to claim regardless of the BTC finding they couldn't impose football penalties for dual cntracts without hard evidence, Now the BBC has explicitly identified players who have side letters. When RTC implied this it was tenable to write it off as Timmy bampottery, but the BBC has legal standards that make it unlikely they would say that, eg, Barry Ferguson had one without sight of evidence. Obviously it would have been brilliant if they had actually shown contractual language contained in a side letter, but I can think of several legal and prudential reasons they wouldn't until the appeal and SPL process is done. The quotes they provided from Papac and the other bloke, which probably came from a different unconstrained source, were strongly indicative of non-discretionary payments in lieu of wages. And the sheer number of players and amounts make it highly unlikely the payments could be something other than payments for football. Obviously for us forum obsessives there was a lot we knew and the showmanship was grating, but the intended audience for this wasn't the P&B / RTC readers - it was the general public. It is now harder for the SPL, politicians, non-football tax-payers etc. to ignore what is going on. There is always the possibility the side letters the BBC are talking about are a) forgeries or b) works of legal genius that somehow allow Rangers to argue that some of their players accepted 40% of their compensation as absolutely discretionary bonuses unlinked to traditional football compensation. But it seems unlikely.

[sIGH] I see your problem - you're aware EBTs were widely used, assume discretionary payments are rare in business, and thus everyone must be just as culpable as Rangers. However, annual bonuses which really are discretionary are very, very common in high compensation fields. With a few exceptions, a large chunk of investment bankers have always received bonuses as a large chunk of their total comp. And as I heard many, many times from acquaintances in 2008-2010 those bonuses really are discretionary in the sense there is absolutely no legal obligation to pay it. Lots of people in the City and Wall Street found their actual bonus to be far, far less than the worst case scenario they had ever imagined. Lots found out thy got no bonus right before getting fired Bankers accepted this because they have a great deal of practical ability to move if they get screwed and think they can make up a bad year. There is generally a huge turnover in banking and other fields right after bonus season because people leave if they are unhappy. Football players, on the other hand, sign binding multi-year contracts and can't f**k off to play in another league because they didn't get a bonus. They also have short careers that can end at any time via injury. They are the last people on Earth who would want 40% of heir comp in truly discretionary bonuses. Which is why he smart money was always on side letters - now the BBC has seemed to verify hey exist (although I old be much happier if hey had hown something akin o the leaked draft). As to why this exists - finance professionals can MOVE. There have been a number of bizarre schemes to reduce taxable amounts payable by the City (I recall back in the day bonuses being paid in Turkish Lira with a currency derivative attached so the gap caused by predictable inflation was taxed at a lower rate). The justification generally is the structure is so complicated it won't be abused except by the narrow subset of people who will f**k off to Geneva or New York if pressed overmuch and who pay massive taxes on other amounts at an individual and firm level anyway. Thy get shut own over time when they begin to be systemically abused. This may be a bad justification, but it's a justification. If Rangers were paying football players as football players expect and need to be paid, they implement departed fom the minimal logical justification behind allowing EBTs as a shady and contingent grey area. Rangers was the equivalent of he member of the Animal Libration Rights movement living in a housing scheme in Hamburg who claims he can keep a hunting rifle because the law allowers hunters in rural Bavaria to have one. Probably shouldn't have the loophole at all, but it logically doesn't apply at all to you.

They presented a clear link indicating that in two players cases payments to EBTs were in direct replacement of salaries that would be paid in ordinary course. They then went onto list on the program and on their website players who were linked to side letters, naming several prominent players as beneficiaries thereof. That would seem to be a pretty obvious case where a news organization is absolutely positive about its facts but cannot reveal specific language from documents due to legal restrictions. I am not a UK lawyer but I know enough to know the intersection of libel law, data protection / confidentiality and ongoing judicial and quasi-judicial processes might make it prudent for the BBC not to release five pages of a side letter in which Barry Ferguson is promised £ x a year, £ y a game and £ z if he avoids getting drunk on Scotland duty will be available through his EBT. But the fact that they were so specific about names, amounts and the existence of side letters in the face of those legal constraints leads me to believe they have a pretty damn good gun and it's smoking. Frankly, though, I think the Duff & Phelps stuff is a bit of a red herring from the perspective of "how do we send the shattered remnants of Rangers down to the Third in the glare of public derision". What's done is done on that front and switching administrators now would be...messy. Also, I think Stuart Adamson would be bitterly unhappy to have Big Country associated with Rangers, even at their BBC wake (I am aware he hated Celtic too, btw)

EBTs were legal as long as the payments were discretionary. The assumption behind the RTC interpretation of the case is that given footballers aren't the type to accept discretionary pay, and thus side letters existed documenting contractual payments. Previously, Bears have been claiming no side letters existed. The only example of a player side letter to surface to date was a draft and cold be wished away by particularly thick Orcs. The BBC has now indicated pretty clearly it has extensive evidence of side letters. That means 1) Rangers' explanations about this being normal business practice is toast and 2) the side letters, if they look at all like the draft that surfaced earlier, will constitute dual contracts which will f**k them to hell with the SPL. Only out for Rangers is a) the side letters are, unlike the draft we've seen, not tied to salary, games played etc. and can somehow be couched as discretionary and/or b) the contracts lodged with the SFA contained references to extra payments made through EBTs so they could stretch to argue full disclosure. BOOM - HEADSHOT (unless the BBC side letters are unsigned or otherwise dubious)

No, no no. The market for players is global. An agent has a rough idea of what player X is worth, as adjusted for things like transfer fees (or lack thereof). An agent will push at the upper echelon of that range and the club will beat him down, but barring special circumstances wages n particular won't depart too much from market norms - otherwise the player or club will look somewhere else. By removing the tax obligation associated with a portion of wages, Rangers were able to offer more net cash to, say, Michael Mols than they otherwise would have. Mols decides to go to Rangers for roughly the amount of money he would have gotten from another club, and Rangers gets Mols for an amount of money that would have only netted them their second choice target if they paid tax. HMRC loses, both RFC and Mols benefit but there is absolutely no reason to suspect the player rather than the club garnered most of the "gain". I used Mols as an example (no idea if he is involved) because he is a prime case of why the No.8 "EBTs were legal, there were no second contracts" position is insane. For an EBT to be legal, the payments have to be DISCRETIONARY. This makes sense for an expat investment banker who expects the bulk of compensation in discretionary bonuses anyway. It makes no sense for a 29 year old footballer to except a lower salary than he could get otherwise in exchange for a legally non-binding possibility of discretionary payments. Football players are subject to injuries, loss of form and short careers in a manner bankers are not. Mols did in fact have a career blighted by injury. If EBTs worked in his case like they should have, he would of been paid zero through his EBT while injured. Do you think he would have accepted that arrangement? Any uncorrupt agent would demand market wages for his players and demand side letters (and extra dosh for the risk and annoyance) in exchange for an EBT making up a portion of same. To believe otherwise is fantasy. Now Daly claims to have hard libel proof evidence of such side letters. Nothing unexpected, except for the Bears still fighting in the forests of Burma for the Emperor circa 1948 on this issue.

I take it that this is your Dr. Jekyll appearance and the Mr. Hyde alternate personality aesthetic includes an expanded frame, a faded orange Gers top that doesn't quite fit it anymore, tatoos and a baseball cap? Do you have to change in a phone booth or does it just happen offscreen via. Puff of smoke?

Ach, next you'll be claiming that the Italians, Croats and Germans invented the whole ultra thing when we all know it was the Green Brigade!

Check the #NCFC hash tag on twitter. Lots of Norwich fans saying it was an incredible atmosphere and they enjoyed it. Meanwhile, a group of mental Vanguard bears pieced together one Celtic fan getting injured (self inflicted) and a twitter feed from somebody claiming to be EDL into tales of Celtic getting righteously battered by the outraged denizens of Anglia. The Norwich police praised our conduct. The above is not meant to claim Celtic supporters are Perfect, but we do tend to not do a Manchester every time we travel to England or Europe in numbers and Rangers are desperate to pretend this isn't the case.

If Celtic's board stays silent all the way through the process and casts no votes only when it's clear the measures to allow them back in are going to pass anyway based on votes from smaller clubs making understandable (even if wrong both morally and quite possibly financially) short term decisions, I really hope my fellow Celtic supporters aren't fooled and accept that Celtics board deserves just as much blame as those who voted yes despite the meaningless gesture of a no vote. I can understand keeping away from public media to avoid further ratcheting up the hatred from Bears, but if Celtic isn't conveying clearly through channels to the other clubs how they intend to vote and that they will be there to take the flak for a no vote then they will be putting potential diddy resistors in an impossible position. If Celtic acts as I believe the overwhelming majority of its supporters wish, they'll be offering assurances of a more equitable split of TV money in the near future as a sweetener to potential no votes. Here's hoping.

I posted that the mysterious 800 million story was facially illogical from a basic finance perspective and had to be bullshit, but to be fair to Alex Thommo he caveated the hell out of it and ended with the possibility it was hoax. His mo seems to be simply asking questions and reporting the responses he gets. It's fairly refreshing in that he did obvious things like Harry Whyte until got quotes, directly asked UEFA and the SPL questions etc. and other bits of basic journalism that seemed a bit beyond the Scottih sports media posse. He is playing a valuable role in pointing out the Emperors wardrobe is looking unseasonably thin. The drawback is that while it's okay for a war correspondent to focus on sources and present what they say as news, the legal and financial background here means some of the stuff he lays out isn't as important as he thinks it is. A Serbian militia leader statements are per se news and it's not hard to verify what he says and whether he matters. A finance spiv building a fantasy scenario with sheaves of paper is another matter entirely. I'm not sure Thommo comes prepared for Walter Mittys with briefcases rather than AKs or is capable of sifting through all the legal and financial opinions bouncing around. The BBC documentary on the other hand is on a different level. I'm baffled by the Bears on twitter saying its not a problem if it's like the first one. The first one laid out critical facts about Whyte in a coherent manner and with the added heft that it came from the BBC and libel law vetting. After all this they still want to get their retaliation in early on the messenger (see also Vanguard Bears RedWatch style attempt to "expose" RTC) rather than listen to an unpalatable truth. It may be a damp squib, but to reject it out of hand as party of the Opus Dei conspiracy is silly, No.8 genuine question: How can you oscillate so wildly between reasonable and nasty triumphalism?

Agreed. It's not just sports reporters who look like idiots when they delve into finance matters, it's alo war correspondents. The bit about the Euobond being instantly swapped from Canadian property to Rangers makes no sense - either Loughrey is delusional or Thompson severely misunderstood what he was saying. I can't see any sane investor ploughing money into a Rangers bond offering at a derisory 6.5% interest - with it's history of administration and structural deficits plus the uncertainty surrounding Scottish football the rate would be much, much higher. Man United bonds pay 8.75%!