The only person to blame for Rangers’ downfall is Murray
WHEN Rangers plunged over a cliff in 2012, one of Scotland’s cultural institutions was humiliated. And someone had to pay.
Duff & Phelps administrators David Whitehouse and Paul Clark were hastily detained and, as it turned out, wrongly prosecuted by the Lord Advocate — and now want millions as compensation. Craig Whyte was placed on trial on charges of fraud, but found not guilty.
Now it’s HMRC in the dock for the reported ‘multi-million pound blunder’ which led to the club’s implosion.
The Times newspaper claims £50million could be wiped from the final tax bill owed by the Ibrox oldco to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs because Hector claimed too much money in the first place.
The final tax bill could turn out to be no higher than £20m.
The key word here is could. HMRC has dropped a pointless £24m penalty charge, but released a rare public statement saying they won the Rangers row and ‘did not miscalculate anything’.
Even so, a grossed-up, amended claim of £48m in respect of the big tax case is still in dispute.
If an appeal succeeds next year, the final figure could finish up as low as £20m. But the could aspect of this is the nub of this whole oddly-timed business.
Rangers fans argue that an accurate big-tax-case bill of £20m eight years ago could have saved their club a hell of a lot of heartache and humiliation.
It could have persuaded a reputable buyer to step in and buy the club before Whyte got his grubby hands on the assets for a pound and stopped paying tax and national insurance, thereby driving the oldco towards administration then liquidation.
When Whyte bought Rangers, no one knew for sure how much the big-tax-case bill would actually be.
Speculation raged over tens of millions, but the actual figure of £94m didn’t come out publicly until Duff & Phelps issued a report to creditors in October 2012.
All people had to go on before that was guesswork. And because no one of sound mind or reputation would have taken that gamble, the only people prepared to risk it were chancers.
During Whyte’s trial, Sir David Murray’s right-hand man Mike McGill described some of the wide boys interested in buying Rangers.
Most you wouldn’t trust with a five-year-old’s piggy bank.
Two characters connected to an unnamed English football manager bore a letter promising funding of ¤50m Euros from a Belgian bank which looked the real deal, but later proved to be fraudulent.
Also sniffing around was a Lithuanian banking institution with alleged links to organised crime and money laundering.
Could someone decent and reputable have emerged from the chaos and led Rangers safely to the other side?
Maybe. But that’s a bit like saying the Titanic would have made it to New York had she struck a smaller iceberg.
It’s hypothetical, nobody knows for sure.
The fact is that HMRC could have arrived at the projected figure of £20m for the big-tax case nine years ago and stuck it on a billboard in Glasgow Central Station for everyone to see.
It wouldn’t have changed the fact that, when you throw in an £18m bank debt and the £2.8m for the ‘wee-tax case’, plus a commitment to spend £1.7m improving the stadium, the price of saving Rangers would still have been £40m minimum.
And the notion of captains of industry queuing up to buy a struggling Scottish football club at the height of the global banking crisis for that kind of money is optimistic.
Ally McCoist spoke for the club’s supporters when he insisted HMRC took Rangers down for no good reason.
No one is defending the UK taxman. Hector is big and unpleasant enough to look out for himself.
Yet, right from the start of this sorry, angry saga there has been a curious reluctance to point fingers at the actual architect of the Rangers downfall. Sir David Murray triggered an unsustainable footballing arms race. And the EBT scam was the mechanism used to fire the bullets.
If fans want to land a punch on HMRC or anyone else over the final tax bill, then that’s fine. Take a swing.
But there should never be a free pass for the man who brought the mess to the front door of Ibrox in the first place.
The man who sold the club to Craig Whyte for a pound to salvage his own MIH business empire was Sir David Murray. With no mis-use of EBTs, there’s no HMRC. It really is that simple.