Dave King and OldCo

[RANGERRAB 3,759]

He took risks with the club. Was he entitled to? Yes. Was HMRC entitled to question then and come after us for £m's? Yes.

 

The fact that we won the case doesn't completely exonerate him as he put us in the position to be questioned by gambling by using a tax scheme that had a high degree of risk. There was never a 100% chance of a successful outcome. He exposed the company to the possibility of an HMRC investigation.

 

In what way we're entitled to come after us for £m's ? I'll say again the FTTT & UTTT verdicts suggest otherwise.

What entitled them to send a bill for £24m ? Which tax laws were being broken in this EBT scheme which entitled them to do this? Please do elaborate and tell us.

I fail to understand why you & others on here continue to defend HMRC. SDM may have gambled but HMRC gambled even more by sending us this bill. We need to know why.

[der Berliner 3,813]

I'm not sure that describing Rangers' use of EBT was "perfectly legal". if it was like that then there wouldn't be a BTC and a lot of what happened would not arise.

 

Not everything is black and white when it comes to tax and many tax avoidance schemes move into a grey area. The EBTS were a grey area, but it was ruled that our use was on the right side of it, but it wasn't a 100% certainty.

 

It was SDM who oversaw the use of the scheme and he should have known that there was some sort of risk involved as there is with most tax avoidance schemes at that level. It was a risk he was willing to take, but it's not unreasonable for people to criticise him for taking that risk, particularly with hindsight, and the resultant fallout.

 

Generally, if we all sat on a table, we would have cleared all this debate up within a few minutes.

 

With regards to the above: what turned the debate sour was that some were throwing in names and Rangers "custodians" into a debate that was actually going on about the behaviour of HMRC during the Whyte takeover period, saying that those and SDM were also to blame on it and the following years. That was actually not in dispute, and still is not. Which I pointed out far above. A lot of individuals share blame for the takeover and the demise that followed. The more comes out though, the more you get the impression that despite individual blame for the takeover is very much due, HMRC sure did some peculiar things as well. That was what we focussed on initially, no-one did say that they alone where the guilty party or others are to be freed of their guilt.

[Bluedell 5,679]

In what way we're entitled to come after us for £m's ? I'll say again the FTTT & UTTT verdicts suggest otherwise.

What entitled them to send a bill for £24m ? Which tax laws were being broken in this EBT scheme which entitled them to do this? Please do elaborate and tell us.

The EBT scheme had to be done in a very specific way and if was not done entirely correctly then there would be tax due.

 

Would a reasonable man find it believable that a footballer would enter into a written contract but have to rely on a chunk of his wages being paid as loans and this arrangement not being entered into in writing? I would expect HMRC to investigate such types of schemes to ensure that money was not being lost. They did find that we owed cash on the wee tax case and that would not have been found if they had not started to investigate us. Are you trying to say that they weren't entitled to look at that?

 

As for the sending of the bill, that's just a mechanism to start the ball rolling. Happens day in, day out.

 

There's much to criticise about HMC's actions on this but the overview that they investigated our EBT arrangements does not appear unreasonable.

Edited September 16, 2015 by Bluedell

[Scott7 6,170]

"A chunk of a player's wages" - I hope that's not an admission that payments under the scheme were earnings subject to tax at source.

[Little General 80]

from SOS facebook

 

 

maybe King knows this hence his comments re oldco.