Why would the taxman make peace with Rangers?

The process of administration at Ibrox has not been typical of those which has happened at other clubs in the UK in the recent past.

When Motherwell entered the process in 2001 they had to shed 19 players. Both Dundee (twice, of course) and Livingston sacked several members of staff when the administrators moved in, as part of a drastic cost-cutting exercise in order to keep the club alive in the short-term. Similar actions have been taken at several English clubs who have been emperiled by the same circumstances.

A few weeks ago, there was a great big hootenanny in the Scottish press about the number of redundancies which would have to be made at Ibrox, especially after the administrators Duff & Phelps announced the club needed to find £1 million of savings per month in order to survive till the end of the season. The club managed, in the end, to make a huge PR coup out of it, with the playing staff agreeing to across-the-board wage cuts, and only two players, Gregg Wylde and Mervan Celik exiting - both voluntarily.

Wylde clearly has a clever agent advising him. It's pretty certain that he knew he would be offered a contract by Bolton, who had a £400,000 bid for him rejected last summer, and so would be on the dole only for a short period, yet he came out with a glorious sob story about how he couldn't sleep at night for worry about the Gers' future, and gave the impression he was agreeing to voluntary redundancy as a personal sacrifice to save others. I would bet a significant sum of money that he is on a higher wage at the Reebok Stadium, along with a handsome signing-on fee. Some sacrifice!

Celik, meanwhile, could be a poster boy for this whole fiasco - brought in during January from Swedish side GAIS (who are claiming £300,000 in compensation), the winger made a grand total of one start, and left after all of about 8 weeks in Scotland.

Anyway, my point is this - there is no way on earth that those wage cuts provide Rangers with the required savings, even though the likes of Allan McGregor, Steven Davis and Steven Whittaker were on high salaries by SPL standard. So it is not unreasonable to assume that liquidation is a potential outcome to all this...nay, it is probably a more likely outcome than salvation, especially as all potential buyers are hedging their bets until the outcome of the club's case with HMRC. A £50 million-plus tax bill would surely finish them off.

But, I hear you say, the taxman will surely strike a deal with the club for a more manageable fee, when the alternative is Rangers going bust and the public revenue receiving zilch? Certainly, that is the line that Duff & Phelps are spouting, with the caveat that HMRC will offer a deal as soon as Craig Whyte is completely out of the picture. And the Scottish media seem happy to accept this line of argument as fact, even though it comes from the same PR company that fed them Whyte's white lies for months.

But according to the likes of Private Eye magazine and RangersTaxCase.com, there are plenty of football clubs who have been up to similar mischief in recent years and are under investigation. And HMRC are used to dealing with far bigger figures than £50 million - just think of the £5 billion that Vodafone managed to avoid; compared to that, the Gers' tax bill would be, if not a drop in the ocean, then at least a drop in the loch. A reduced fine would at least vindicate some of the dubious financial practices involved, and set a precedent that other football clubs would be tempted to follow - dodge your tax bills and, if the midden hits the windmill, you won't have to pay them after all.

Certainly, I don't trust a word being spouted by the mainstream media in Scotland on the subject - after a brief spell where they got the knives out for Whyte (who presumably could be heard saying "Et tu, Tom English?" to the Scotsman's chief football writer, who published a sycophantic interview with the Rangers owner a few weeks before administration, then shamelessly stuck the boot in when subsequent events made him look like a berk). So I'm afraid that, until there are some facts to back up the claims of a deal with the taxman, or indeed to back up the legitimacy of any of these bids for Rangers, I'm going to raise a sceptical eyebrow every time.

Damn, this started out as a blog on how the Scottish football authorities are making an arse of handling this whole situation - instead it had turned, like so many of my other blogposts, into a stream-of-consciousness rant.

But at least it's a good rant. So the other blog will have to wait till next time. I bet you'll all be on tenterhooks...

L.