Suite R0193 35 Victoria Road Darlington County Durham United Kingdom DL1 5SF email - [email protected] tel - 07936 113887 UEFA Route de Genève 46 Case postale CH-1260 Nyon Switzerland

Dears sirs,

At the beginning of February I sent you a letter giving details of a petition that had been started to give voice to the many football fans who have serious concerns about the level of integrity within the Scottish game. The call was to have the current administrators at the Scottish Football Association and the Scottish Football Professional league resign and allow a board to be put in place that has no connection with the questionable events that have occurred over the past five years.

The petition has now reached 2000 signatures and I felt it right to contact you again to give a more detailed explanation of the reasons for our concern. Firstly let me put in context the magnitude of the signature count. We are a small country and the figure equates to 11% of the average weekly attendance over all major leagues in our country and 22% of our top division. I would say that, because of the limited coverage we have been able to give to the petition, the support is far larger than the number of signatures would suggest. Even ignoring this it is not a small percentage and, in a market where attendances are dropping, further disillusionment would have a devastating affect on the sport in our country.

Whenever an issue like this is raised by a member of the public normally the first reaction is to reject it as an action involving inter-club rivalry. I believe that this may be the reason that numerous previous communications on the subject during M. Platini's tenure at UEFA have not even elicited an acknowledgement. There is one club in particular mentioned in this report, Glasgow Rangers FC, and in that context the main rivalry would be with the fans of Celtic FC. It is a rivalry that has a history of extreme animosity and vindictiveness, so let me assure you that I have no connection with either of these clubs and I am not driven by club rivalry. I have supported one of the smaller teams in our leagues, Hibernian FC, for over fifty years but for the last thirty years I have never attended a professional football match. I state this to try to remove any thoughts from your mind that I am motivated to write this through football club fanaticism. My reason is completely based on the immorality and possible criminality of the events. Despite this the complaint is not the feelings of just one individual but, as the petition shows, it is a widely supported view spread over the support of many different clubs.

At present we are experiencing great changes in our game where impropriety and corruption are being investigated in the upper echelons of football. The implications of this on the work load of UEFA and FIFA is great but I do not believe that means that more localised issues should be ignored. Afterall, a successful conclusion to these investigations relies heavily on co-operation of the member associations so the personnel there must be above reproach.

Because of the recent case regarding Galatasary of Turkey and the case of CF Malaga of Spain in 2012 a copy of this document will be sent to the football authorities in Turkey and Spain. Copies are also being sent to our country's league sponsor Ladbrokes plc, all major

1 media outlets in the United Kingdom, Spain and Turkey and the government politicians responsible for sport in our country.

There is so much out on the internet that points to much more serious allegations compared to what I detail here. These include emails between our football authorities and the club that implicate the authorities in attempts to circumvent UEFA's rules to ensure that one club gains financially at the expense of others. The contents of a secret agreement reached between the authorities and the same club have also been revealed. I do not include these in my claims here because of the difficulties in substantiating the origin of the documents and because I believe there is enough in the way of facts to warrant an investigation without them. No doubt someone will act on this other evidence in the future and it would be better for UEFA to pre- empt that by undertaking an investigation in advance.

Yours faithfully

A. Reiver

2 In the accompanying report I shall layout in detail the reasons for the current unrest. It includes.

 Breaking UEFA rules with regard to qualifying for a club's UEFA license by withholding details of Overdue Payables known to the officers of organising bodies.

 Giving approval to become a member of a club's board of directors to an individual with a criminal record for multiple incidences of tax fraud and current contempt of court violations.

 Giving approval to two individuals to sit on a club's board despite these two having been on the board of a club that went into liquidation within the five year period stipulated in the leagues' own rules. It had in their case been three years.

 Allowing an officer of the sport's national bodies to continue in office during investigation into irregular tax methods of a club. The officer is known to have benefited from these tax issues to a value of about €120,000 whilst serving as a director of the club under investigation and being involved in the adoption of the scheme.

 Manipulated the same investigation by excluding the review of proven tax offences, where €3.6 million was unpaid, from the investigation purview.

 Failing to act with regard to breach of their own rules when a club was found, after a police raid, to have undeclared side contracts for players at the club.

 Involved in secret negotiations with a liquidated club and the purchasers of its assets in an attempt to fast track the new club into the upper reaches of the league structure to the disadvantage of other member clubs.

 Behaved in such a way that has resulted in the Scottish Football Association being taken to court. Cases that will take place over the coming months.

In addition to these items we are hearing unsubstantiated reports of decisions being made in hotels and restaurants where members of the football authorities are making decisions in partnership with club officials that would appear to be to the detriment of other clubs. It may be of no matter but in the current climate of mistrust from the fans it just adds to our concerns.

3 Improper allocation of UEFA license

In 2012, the year prior to Rangers FC going into liquidation, the Scottish Football Association(SFA) would appear to have been compliant in the club falsely claiming that they met the UEFA criteria to be awarded a license to enter their competitions.

Between 1999 and 2011 the club employed two methods of side payments to players that drew the attention of the Governments Tax authorities. One, Employee Benefit Trusts(EBT), has been challenged by the tax authorities as being not legitimate but, at the time and at present, is under appeal. The other, the Discount Option Scheme(DOS), has also been challenged and proven NOT to be legitimate. The club accepted this latter finding and was issued with a tax bill of around €3.6 million which was included in the club's unaudited accounts for the year ending June 2011. This had been agreed sometime between March and May 2011. In June 2011 the tax authorities imposed a fine on top of the bill when the bill became overdue and issued a demand for payment which was served on the club by officers of the Scottish courts. The implication here is that the tax payables, as defined by Article 50 of UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations, became due somewhere during the months March to May 2011. The fine and the demand for payment made at the beginning of June shows that the payment was overdue at this time. Despite this UEFA were not informed of the issue as they are required to be under by Article 66 of UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations. The Scottish Football Association(SFA) may or may not have been informed by the club but the information was much publicised and yet the SFA clearly did not look to clarify the matter. Later when questioned about the issue a representative of the SFA put forward reasons that varied with time and none of which can be substantiated. Thus the SFA put forward the club for inclusion in UEFA organised competitions vouching for their qualification under the FFP criteria when clearly they had to be aware at two out of the three check points, 30th June and 30th of September, that it was probable that the club had overdue tax payables.

Abuse of Fit and Proper Person Approval

The owner of the club during the UEFA license issue and subsequently when it went into liquidation was banned, rightly, from ever being involved with football in Scotland after it was found that he did not declare a past offence under stock exchange rules.

Now, though, we have a person, Mr David King, who has 41 convictions for tax evasion which resulted in fines to a value of around €52 million being confirmed as "Fit and Proper" by the football administrators . His agreement with the courts to plead guilty to these charges after a prolonged legal battle saw other charges of money laundering, racketeering and fraud being dropped. He had in addition an active contempt of court sentence of three months in jail, suspended, when approved by the Scottish football authorities to assume the post of chairman at the club. There would appear to be a strange contradiction in values of the SFA when you consider these two chairmen.

In addition, the chairman is now on that board of directors along with another, Mr Paul Murray, despite both failing to meet the SFA's criteria that disbars anyone who was on the board of a club that has suffered liquidation from holding a directorship for five years. Both these gentlemen were on the board when the original Rangers FC went into liquidation in 2012. Obviously they were both also on the board during the UEFA license affair.

4 Failure to enforce the laws without discrimination

The illegal tax practice, the Discount Option Scheme(DOS), also threw up further examples of the improper relationship between the Scottish football authorities and the club that was Rangers FC. When police from outside Scotland raided the club's offices on a separate matter they uncovered documents that were found to be undeclared side contracts signed with some players guaranteeing them extra tax free payments. This issue is in clear breach of both the SFA and Scottish Professional Football League(SPFL) rules that say ALL written agreements on payments must be declared and yet no action was taken by the authorities over this. These side contracts have been proved to have been deliberately hidden from the football authorities and, tellingly, their existence prior to their discovery by the police was openly denied by officials at the club when information was requested by the SFA and lawyers. Later the football authorities did call a commission, under the leadership of Lord Nimmo Smith, to investigate the matter but limited the scope to only the EBT payments, which were under appeal, and omitted the Discount Option Scheme which had been proven, and accepted by the club, to be illegal and had a number of undisclosed side contracts. The outcome of that commission was therefore flawed. In 2011 the SFA threw East Stirlingshire and Spartans out of the Scottish cup because they fielded one improperly registered player. The latter of these to team's "crime" was to have only dated a document once instead of twice. The previous year Dunfermline Athletic were also ejected from the same competition for administrative errors in player registration. These were all accepted as oversights by the clubs compared to the deliberate breach of rules with regard to the side letter issues with Rangers FC and yet they faced punitive actions that were, for some reason, spared Rangers.

Actions at odds with SFA remit

Since 2012 and the liquidation of Rangers football club the SFA and SPFL executives have acted in such a way that has been at odds with their remit of looking after ALL the clubs in Scottish football. Instead excessive time and effort has been spent on helping the new club take over the mantel of the old one. I must state here that under Scottish law there is no difference between the club and the company running it and therefore the idea of a continuation of the club whilst the company goes out of existence is at odds with the law covering liquidation. Many supporters have railed against the idea that we still have the old club playing in the Scottish leagues. I can understand that many of the supporters of the old club will look on it differently and they are free to do so but these people are the fans, the football administrators are not fans and should deal only in the legal facts. Instead they have engaged in taking sides and pushing on those from other clubs the argument that nothing has changed even going as far as stating in the press that the new club IS the old club. They started by trying to place the new club into the top division in our leagues. Only protests and action by the fans stopped this. They followed that by attempting to place them in second tier but that too was successfully opposed. In the end the newest member of the leagues was given entry to the bottom division despite the rules that state that they must apply for the vacancy along with other qualifying clubs. Throughout the process the SFA and SPFL were acting on arrangements that were conceived in pact organised in secret between SFA, SPFL, Scottish Football League(SFL), representatives of the club in liquidation and representatives of the newly formed club. This has become to be known as the "five way agreement" and is still shrouded in secrecy despite some detail being leaked on the internet. The question has to be asked here, why the secrecy. The fans made known their opinions of the moves made by the authorities to give precedence to a single club. We know now that the old club broke the rules of UEFA and the home country's administrators and yet discussions are held with them where the detail of what was discussed are prevented from becoming public.

5 Officials with conflict of interest

One issue linking the SFA with the EBT and DOS tax irregularities, raised earlier in this document, of the club was the SFA President until 2015 Mr Campbell Ogilvie. During the period in which the Discount Option Scheme and EBT payments were in use at the club Mr Ogilvie was a director at Rangers and he personally benefited from the EBT scheme receiving a sum of €120,000. At the time of the EBT award he was also treasurer of the SFA. In addition, he was closely involved with construction and implementation of the DOS in the late 1990s. Because of his position as director of the club it would be difficult to understand how he could be unaware of the practice of issuing undisclosed side letters during the DOS and yet, despite having been involved with the SFA since 2003, he failed to inform them of the practice. It took an unrelated police raid on the club's premises for their existence to be revealed. Further, during the investigations into the undisclosed side letters Mr Ogilvie refused to recuse himself from the SFA. Another beneficiary, Mr Andrew Dickson, of the EBT scheme for a sum €42,000 has since been involved with operations at the SFA.

SFA neglect left Rangers vulnerable.

These episodes have also affected Rangers and their fans. They have seen their team put into liquidation and the subsequently created replacement has, and still is, being dragged through the law courts because of the actions of those who have created and then run the new club. It has been floated on the AIM stock exchange only to be removed later when they could not find anyone to act as their Nominated Advisor, a strict criteria required by any exchange in this country. The inability to find an advisor and the removal from the stock exchange is directly linked to the approval, by the SFA, of the chairmen with 41 convictions mentioned earlier. No legitimate line of credit from any bank is available to the club and, with the money raised from the stock market flotation long since run out and the club operating with an annual debt measured in millions of Euros, loans are being raised from the Far East that are shrouded in secrecy and where the legality of the funds have been questioned. As a consequence another administrative event is regarded as a distinct possibility.

6 Conclusion

Our concerns are that the integrity of football in our country has serious doubts hanging over it through the lack of proper action by both the Scottish Football Association and the Scottish Professional Football League. With them being the targets of court proceedings over the next few months these concerns would appear only to have a potential to increase. The officials of these bodies have overseen a period in which the majority of ordinary supporters have grown disillusioned with the running of the game here. Many, who have not already done so, are now stating that they will be abandoning supporting their clubs and not renewing their season tickets next season. The reason most often given is that they do not have confidence that those who run and organise the game do so with a vision that all clubs are equal and as a result there must be real doubts as to whether the matches are not tainted by manipulation. These are the personal feelings of many grass roots supporters who have no opportunity to make a difference and whose only option is just to walk away. For this reason we appeal to you to investigate what is happening and give us the opportunity to regain our faith in the sport here. Unfortunately the situation is now so serious that I do not believe that reassuring words will be enough. We have seen too much condoned by our football authorities and our protests being ridiculed while the integrity of our sport appears to diminish as we look on impotent.

Perhaps the best way to put the activities of 2011-12 in context is to include here a quote made at the time by the chairman of one of our more modest clubs Raith Rovers. This gentlemen, Mr Turnbull Hutton, said in a press statement -

"It is not an SFL issue. We've been lumbered with this. There are rules we feel they should be followed. They [newco Rangers] should apply for the Third Division. [We are being] bullied, railroaded and lied to. We are being lied to by the Scottish FA and the SPL. We are being threatened and bullied. It is not football as I know it. It was a ridiculous document which came out last week whereby the threat was there that if you don't vote for an acceptance into the First Division, a breakaway SPL2 will come along and those who didn't vote wouldn't be invited. What kind of game are we running here? It is corrupt."

The full press statement can be found here - http://stv.tv/sport/football/109094-raith-director-we-are-being-bullied-and-lied-to-over-rangers- situation/

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