CAMPBELL Ogilvie last night offered to stand down from the SFA presidency if the football association's board or member clubs felt it was in the best interests of the organisation.
Ogilvie, company secretary at Rangers from 1978 until 2002, received £95,000 in an Employee Benefit Trust (EBT) upon his departure as a director from the Ibrox club in 2005, a factor which some feel leaves him impossibly compromised if the SPL investigation into such practices, and so-called "second contracts", requires the SFA to act as an appellate body in the matter.
Although Ogilvie has left the room when the association has had discussions about the Ibrox club, he is well aware of a perception problem and would bow to the will of the association's board and members should they deem it necessary for him to go.
"If I am causing the SFA a problem, and the board felt that and the clubs felt that, then I would stand down," said Ogilvie, who presided over the association's AGM last week. "The SPL investigation is coming up - we will see the outcome of that. And, if the members of the SFA or the board want me to stand down, that is the way it will be. If that is not the case, then we will discuss it.
"You would have to ask the clubs [what they feel about the situation], but to me they have been very supportive and the board have been very supportive. I emphasise the fact that in the board meetings relating to Rangers, naturally as any official at Hampden would do if it was related to their club, I have left the room. From day one, I have said I cannot be part of any discussion on Rangers."
Ogilvie, an old-school football administrator, feels too many decisions are reached these days with financial aspects as the main consideration, but he is sure the authorities will act with "football integrity" uppermost in their thoughts in relation to the current crisis.
"Decisions in football are now being taken with finance up here and in many cases football down there. When I came into football in the early Seventies things revolved around football."
Ogilvie was at a Fifa Congress when the BBC documentary The Men Who Sold The Jerseys was aired, but he watched the show upon his return. He said he had no knowledge of matters such as the £30,000 EBT taken by Graeme Souness, shortly before his Blackburn Rovers side completed the transfer of Turkish midfielder Tugay from Ibrox. By the end of his time at Ibrox, Ogilvie was director of football strategy, with payment of players all carried out by an autonomous football business unit, but he may have signed off on the club's accounts during at least one of the years in question.
"I appreciate I was there at that time and people will associate me with some of the issues," he said. "If I signed off the accounts it has been in good faith."
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