Caught on camera: contract issues at heart of tax case

Sports writer

Friday 25 May 2012

While the full extent of Rangers' use of Employee Benefit Trusts was laid bare by BBC Scotland's investigation, The Men Who Sold The Jerseys, the club must still wait to discover the consequences of the tax scheme that ran for a decade.

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Richard Wilson

The first-tier tribunal is currently deliberating over Rangers' appeal against a £24m tax assessment delivered by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, with additional interest and penalties, but the Ibrox side is also currently the subject of an investigation by the Scottish Premier League into undisclosed payments.

Harper McLeod, the Glasgow-based law firm, is conducting the SPL's enquiry – despite disquiet among Rangers fans since the firm has also represented Celtic – and requests for paperwork were made to Duff & Phelps, the administrators, last March. The SPL is believed to have now set a deadline to receive all documents, or sanctions will be applied.Seventy-two Rangers players, staff and coaches benefited from the EBTs, and paperwork presented to court revealed that HMRC has evidence that 53 of these individuals also received side letters, detailing income that would be paid through the scheme.EBTs are legal as discretionary payments, involving money loaned from a trust fund that is then not liable to income tax rates. It is HMRC's contention that Rangers used EBTs as an additional means of paying wages, so were running a tax evasion scheme."If the evidence is that the players had side contracts, this will substantially undermine Rangers' case," says Elliot Weston, tax partner with the law firm Lawrence Graham."HMRC need only show that the Employee Benefit Trusts operated as a means of channelling additional remuneration from employer to employee as a reward for services."Rangers may argue that all payments were discretionary. The club would also then make the case that the EBTs – which were detailed in the club's accounts – did not have to be disclosed to the SPL, whose rules D9.3 and D1.13 "impose a prohibition on players receiving payments for playing football ... except where such payments are made in accordance with a form of contract approved by the SPL."The SPL's investigation is ongoing, but is likely to conclude that there is enough cause for an independent commission to be established. If any rule breaches are established, there are 18 possible sanctions available that are unlimited in scope.It may not necessarily follow that any breaches would mean that the contracts of these players would be invalidated, or results in games they played overturned."The view that the SPL took was that there was sufficient evidence to indicate that the way that Rangers had been paying their players was via a dual method, the payroll and EBTs, so there was a case to answer for," says David Roberts, of the legal firm, Olswang, that represented Bill Miller during his bid for the Ibrox side and held discussions with the SPL. "What Duff & Phelps said to us was that there may be some reticence pushing the investigation forward because a beneficiary of the EBT payments [Campbell Ogilvie] was now on the SFA board, but we saw no evidence of that. My genuine belief was that this was an issue that gave rise to a potential breach of the rules and the SPL were discharging their governing body duties by looking at it. It may also breach the SFA rules as well. It was something being taken very seriously by the authorities."

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Caught on camera: contract issues at heart of tax case

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