STEWART REGAN, the chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, believes the governing body acted appropriately when they awarded Rangers a European place in 2011.
The Ibrox club were given a license to play in the Champions League five years ago despite owing £2.8m to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs relating to their use of Employee Benefit Trusts, a bill that became known as the “Wee Tax Case”.
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UEFA rules state clubs taking part in their competitions must declare any "overdue payables" to the taxman and reveal details on whether there is a commitment to repay amounts, or a dispute over any bill.
That prompted some Celtic shareholders to raise the matter at the club’s 2013 AGM, believing Celtic had lost out on millions of potential revenue that would have been due to them had they entered the Champions League that year instead of Rangers who, the requisitioners believed, should not have been allowed to enter the competition.
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Some Celtic supporters even took the unusual step of placing an advert in a Swiss newspaper yesterday urging UEFA to intervene in the matter dubbed “Resolution 12”.
Regan, though, revealed the SFA have been in dialogue with Celtic on this matter for the past three years and insisted the governing body had acted entirely in accordance with the rules.
“It’s our understanding that the requisitioners accept that there are no issues with the granting of the license to Rangers,” he said.
“Where they do have an issue is in what’s called the monitoring period, immediately after the granting of the license to Rangers. Our position on that monitoring period is that we have fully complied with all of the UEFA regulations and requirements during that period.
“We have said that if the requisitioners are still not happy they should take it up with UEFA. We’ve supplied the email addresses and contact details of the people that the requisitioners need to speak to and I don’t know if the requisitioners have made contact with them yet but they have told us that is their intention.
"We've said if they do that then we'll fully cooperate and comply with any requests for information from UEFA and we've provided details at UEFA for the requisitioners to make contact.
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"So we believe that the matter has been communicated to those involved and they will deal with it as they see fit. Our position hasn’t changed on this since 2013 and we’ve been in dialogue with Celtic since then on this point.”
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