If Wray did declare deals, why not say?

SOMETHING doesn’t add up here, and it’s not necessarily how Saracens operate within Premiership Rugby’s salary cap regulations while maintaining their all-conquering squad. If Nigel Wray has declared the business and property deals he has with some of his star players, as he has claimed since Sportsmail’s revelations, why the silence from Premiership Rugby Ltd? Why no statement from the league explaining that, yes, their salary cap manager knew about these various schemes and has no issue with them? Why instead have PRL asked to see this newspaper’s information, gathered during a four-month investigation? When Saracens initially responded to Sportsmail’s enquiries, the club would not even confirm on the record that they had made their regulators aware that their multi-millionaire owner had gone into business with Owen Farrell and other senior players and, in some cases, bought properties with them. Now Wray appears desperate to share this information. It would help, of course, if PRL would say something in response, rather than hide behind a regulation that for some reason demands that any such matters remain confidential while opposing teams and fans wonder if the most powerful outfit in English rugby is playing by the rules. We’ve seen this all before. When two clubs were caught breaching salary cap rules in 2014, they kept it quiet. This time, however, it is more difficult as the evidence detailed by the Sportsmail Investigations Team has forced the issue into the open and tested the omerta that appears to have existed in the past. Already Wray has felt it necessary to share his interpretation of the rules, and provided an insight that suggests Saracens ain’t no Dragons’ Den. ‘If any of our players have a sound commercial idea, I am interested and I may invest,’ says Wray, adding that ‘investment is not salary’. It would be interesting to know if any of these co-investments have ever gone wrong for the players. One imagines not. But right now, of course, we don’t know. Privately, rival clubs question Wray’s logic and therein lies the problem. If the rules are open to interpretation, and Saracens think they have come up with a clever workaround, are the regulations robust enough? And are those employed to regulate, if Wray has indeed declared these coinvestments, robust enough? Yesterday PRL said they had a duty to deliver the salary cap in a ‘transparent, objective and non-discriminatory manner’. But it is the obvious lack of transparency that is proving so damaging, not least to the integrity of their competition.