If you took out life insurance and never told the insurance company your had some terminal illness, would they be entitled to refuse to pay out if you died 10 years later?
I find it incredible that they wouldn't look at a contract from 2001 till 2010. The fact remains that it's HMRC's incompetence which has caused this problem. All the relevant documents should have been studied at the end of that tax year and any misunderstandings settled then. As things stand, we have 10 years worth of accounts in dispute and the club's screwed.
In your example, it's like going for a yearly check up and the doctor said that everything was fine. Then after 10 years he says he's changed his mind, you've had a degenerative illness from the beginning.
So you think the 49 million has been run up since season 2010??? I know your hurting but take a step back and think before you type
Someone in my office asked me about the situation today. I explained that Rangers had used borderline tax avoidance/evasion tactics and that HMRC had ruled on the side of the evasion and decided to backdate their claims and penalties for the life of the scheme. The person asked how can they possibly backdate it when it wasn't technically defined as illegal at the time, my answer was "because they are the government, that's what the government do and that's why we are on the Isle of Man".
I think that this retrospective approach is the crux of the matter. If Rangers can prove that they acted in good faith with their EBT even the Government cannot be seen to be unreasonable in such a case and may come to an agreed settlement. The problem for Rangers is, of course, that it appears that they continued with their EBT even after the likes of Arsenal were brought to book and came to a settlement with HMRC. Personally, while they appear to be in big trouble, I don't believe that Rangers are finished by any means....but I could be wrong (and I hope I am!). In any case, it would appear that Mr Wyte and his cronies have seen Rangers as an opportunity to make a fast buck.
After reading up on him I don't believe Whyte is trying to make a fast buck. I am fairly confident that the **** head had actually hoped to pull this thing he is doing off, to acquire Rangers FC without putting a lot of his own money in. In the past he has been interviewed as saying he wants to be a multi-millionaire, how he wants to be worth at least £100m. I think the problem is that he probably has delusions of grandeur, ambitions which don't match his intellect - and it appears with all his failures in the past that he isn't actually that successful as a businessman. So he see's an opportunity to buy Rangers by mortgaging the season books. He thinks to himself 'If we get into the Champions League this year I might just pull this off' - of course Rangers don't get into the Champions League and he is left with a gaping hole in the books, vastly reduced season ticket income, no bank overdraft to call upon and actually not much personal wealth to tide the company by. So he strings the club along, organising friendlies against Hamburg and Liverpool to try pay the wages while not paying tax to the government. He releases stories about £9m bids for Jelavic getting knocked back, hoping he is encouraging clubs to bid above that, to bail him out - but ultimately the ship has sank too fast and he has failed to pull his great swindle off, to own a massive club without any resources of your own.
If you've read him correctly, he must really be a thicko with a brass neck (mind you the way his eyes bulge, his neck might well be just that!) How could he possibly imagine that mortgaging ticket sales for the foreseeable future, selling Jelavic and any other player possible, and not paying the bills, would keep the club afloat at top SPL level? How did he expect to get away with not paying the VAT? As Rangers fans are (only now) asking -what has he done with the money?
All the amateur accountants have come up with a figure of £20m missing from income vs normal outgoing. The Llyods debt was £18m. If the shape fits in the hole who am I not to push it in.
So if that money has gone, how did he imagine he was going to run/sustain the club (if his intention was to own and run this great institution)? Could he really be so thick? I still think it all points to the objective of a fast buck!
The thing that sent the club down was the £9m in unpaid PAYE and VAT. If Rangers had of made the Champions League they would have received at least £10m. Every one of us would have been sitting here today blaming all of Rangers problems on Murray's tax case, rather than Whyte using a season ticket mortgage to fund the take over.
Seems even crazier that Whyte would place such total reliance on Rangers succeeding in the Champions League. I think the way everything was already in place to appoint his own administrators may point to his real intent from the outset (his seemingly quick action in getting his own administrators in place would show he wasn't just responding on the hoof or so thick as to not have a pre-planned strategy.) It actually looks like he's managed to keep one step ahead of HMRC.
where do you live on the iom Mick? i lived in onchan for 3 years. did you ever frequent the cork & bottle for celtic games?
I've a wee flat on the Douglas promenade not far down from the casino. I'm not sure the Cork & Bottle is there any more, I did a search for it before I came looking for CSCs and I think it is gone. I've only been here just under 3 weeks after moving from Guernsey and Brendan O'Donnells is the only pub I've really went to, although it's more of an aul boys racing pub than a CSC.
the owner died a couple of years ago, was quiet upset when i heard as he was a top man. was magic in their during the MON years. standing room only. brendan o'donnells used to show the games then switch the channel as soon as it had finished. i got fed up of the iom pretty quickly and left after 3 years. made some good friends there tho
It isn't incompetence by HMRC. It's how they operate. Basically they decided that EBTs could be a target. They did it before. Back in 2000/2001 they decided that IT contractors were a target. It was called IR35. IT contractors are forced to operate as limited companies (yes forced - client companies won't contract them otherwise). At the advice of their accountants contractors structured their finances to minimize their liability. To whit: Take a minimum salary and pay minimum PAYE on it. Take the rest out as a dividend at a flat 20% tax. This neatly sidesteps paying the highest rate on PAYE. Perfectly legal and within tax law. Then HMRC decided they didn't like it and moved the goalposts and started sending out retrospective tax bills saying that all of the IT contrractor limited company's profits (less 5% for operating costs) were to be PAYE. With 10's of thousand of contractors in the country they could claw back 10's of millions in tax. The same is now happening for EBTs. They decided to focus on them and see what they can get. It's that ****in simple. Do you for a minute think that the high rollers and big earners in this country are PAYE on their million pound salaries? Are they ****. They use schemes like divident payments, bonus structures, and EBTs, to minimise their liability.
