flyingrodent

God, this is hilarious. I guess nothing says "totally exonerated" quite like two-thirds of the judges allowing that, in principle, Rangers mostly didn't intentionally cheat the Treasury because, like, if you squint really hard at the word "loan", it could possibly mean "a massive cash gift that doesn't ever need to be repaid", except for the instances in which "loan" means "a massive cash gift that does need to be repaid, but won't ever be". Slapstick stuff. Well, if you've ever wondered why you have to pay more than a third of your income to the government but Starbucks gets to trouser almost 100% of their bajillion-pound profits, wonder no longer. It's because paying tax is pretty much optional for them, but compulsory for you.

Well, that seems unfair. When the facts change, I change my opinion on them. It seems only fair.

Not sure if anyone else has done it, but I'll put my hands up and admit I was totally wrong, on numerous occasions throughout this thread. I thought that Rangers were gaining an unfair advantage by gifting massive payments to employees and calling them "loans", even though none have ever been paid back and there is no expectation they would be paid back, as part of a legally suspect scheme designed to avoid enormous amounts of tax. I also thought that Rangers didn't declare these payments to the football authorities because they knew the scheme was legally suspect. I now realise that Rangers weren't gaining any unfair advantage at all when they gifted most of the massive payments to employees and called them "loans", even though none have ever been paid back and there is no expectation they will ever be paid back, as part of a legally sound scheme to avoid enormous amounts of tax. (Although i do recognise that in a minority of cases, they were actually using a legally suspect scheme involving these so-called "loans" to avoid enormous amounts of tax). I also now admit that Rangers didn't declare these to the football authorities because... Well actually, I don't know why they didn't declare them. Presumably, it was because the scheme was so unimpeachable that the club had full confidence in their validity. Anyway, I wholeheartedly apologise for calling your club tax cheats and scammers. This was based on my false belief that a "loan" is supposed to be paid back, rather than gifted tax-free in perpetuity. Sorry, Rangers fans, if I caused you any offence. The judges sure have made a monkey out if me today. Well, two of them did, anyway.

Haven't seen you for months, mate. I'd started to assume you'd fallen down a hole or something.

Oh God, I love this. So two out of three judges rules that massive sums of money given that haven't been and will never be paid back are "loans"? That is outstanding. Why didn't the two judges just stuff that judgement into a cheesegrater and mail it to HMRC's Colon, London? I'll put my hands up - I thought that the idea that "loans" that don't need to be paid back were not really "loans" was so obvious that not even the civil courts could miss it. Looks like I couldn't have been more wrong. And now, the multi-seethe begins. HMRC brood on their revenge, the SPL are handed a huge shite sandwich and every Bun in the land is asking - can we sue anyone in revenge for suiciding our club over nothing? Can Rangers go after Craig Whyte, the revenue or the RTC blogger? Short answer - naw, but that won't stop any of these fannies from trying. Off out to watch my team in the Champions League tonight and the good news is that even if we get pumped six-nil, we're still guaranteed European football next season. Magic.

Yes, this is about the four hundredth time you've given us some variation on this lecture, thanks. Every time that you trot it out, people remind you that almost all of this was true even when your team were still in the SPL; that your team was making the problem far, far worse by deliberately defrauding the rest of its members out of hundreds of thousands of pounds, and that Scottish football's many woes have been decades in the making. Scottish clubs have many problems, and a few of them have immediate, serious financial difficulties to deal with. Nonetheless, during the entire time you've been delivering these little rants, it's only your team that has actually died; only your team that has stolen multi-millions of pounds from people who could ill-afford it, not once but twice; only your team that now splits its time between making highly misleading financial predictions in the boardroom and struggling to beat Peterhead on the park. It's very possible that a few Scottish teams may keel over in the next few years, such is the diabolical state of the game - yours is one of the ones in the "highly endangered" category, not least because you've so clearly learned nothing from its first extinction. Hell, you've devoted hundreds of hours to the pretence that it never died, which does speak volumes.

Yes, yes. Your mob were steadfastly "refusing to buckle" when Craig Whyte put your club in administration; "refusing to buckle" while you were liquidated out of the league set-up; "refusing to buckle" when you weren't allowed to jump right up to the SPL and ever after. With a record like this, it should be plainly apparent that "refusing to buckle" is a synonym for "burying our heads in the sand", or more likely "throwing angry tantrums". And, fun as these little Hannibal Lectures are, there's a reason why they don't work and in fact attract hilarity: Because we've watched your mob deny every disaster that's befallen your club for months, even while they were happening, and because we've all listened to these kinds of substance-free threats of some kind of awful revenge, at some point, just wait and see, a million times over... You know what the outcome of these tirades always is? Our teams are fine, and your club is dead; your players are abysmal; your manager is totally incompetent and your owner is a conman. Which is quite funny.

Probably no need to point it out, since it should be obvious to everyone, but... It was only a few months ago that your fellow supporters repeatedly assured us at this very website, in this very thread, that the idea that Rangers were going bust was a "wet dream", and that you would be fine, history intact, still winning SPL titles and competing in Europe and so on. Also listed as mere "wet dreams" that would never, even happen because they were just diddy fantasies - Rangers being forced to sell almost all of their half-decent players; Rangers losing their Scottish league status due to liquidation; Rangers being refused permission to leapfrog three divisions straight into the SPL; Rangers playing in the third division, amongst many others. And yet, all these things actually did happen, even though the Rangers supporters were certain that they wouldn't. This is a brief summary, but you get my drift. After a year of constant "Who are you going to believe, Me or your lying eyes" patter from your mob, I think the majority of posters must have spotted that most of you NRFC contributors here are totally clueless about the whole situation. Which most of you are, really.

Well, as far as excuses to ignore people who are clearly speaking the truth go, this is at least a new one. Outstanding piece by Cosgrove, there. Might as well be written in Sanskrit though, for those of a Sevco persuasion.

Reading this man's posts is like watching a Basset hound trying to get its head around the rules of Texas Hold 'Em.

Right, so to summarise, you're saying - The source for this issue which I don't intend to address directly is more credible than other sources have been in the past on related issues which I also do not intend to adress directly. - Erroneous and irrelevant assertion that the Times sacked Graham Spiers, which it didn't. - Statement that News International are verminous (they are, but irrelevant to the point). - I'm quite happy for newspapers to report on the issue at hand, just as I was when they reported on irrelevant issues that are not under discussion. Another content-free exchange there, B. Deflector shields still at maximum, eh?

Now, this is one angle of point-dodging that I didn't foresee - that the Times story must be wrong and irrelevant, because of the Leveson Inquiry. Laudible grounds for doubting News International publications generally, of course, but you have to seriously doubt whether this rigorous analysis of sources would be applied if, say, the Times were to announce that Dundee United's owner was a tax-dodger. Would Bendarroch find the Times unreliable then? Would he Falkirk.

And in other good news, I think I might have worked out why Bendarroch and other Bears of similar brainpower are as obstinate as they are... (NSFW)

At a guess... -No story here, unconnected to Rangers -Part of Mhedia conspiracy to destroy Rangers -Journalist owns green toothbrush, sniff sniff, I smell Timothy -Why aren't Mhedia investigating Dermot Desmond for something or other -All the shareholder's fault, nothing to do with Rangers -Vodafone stole billions, so Rangers shouldn't be punished for anything, ever... ...And, once they've had a chance to get the party line straight... -It's all the SFA's fault for not stopping the sale of the club, an act that we would have totally thanked the SFA for, if they had done it, and -The diddy clubbers and plastics deliberately destroyed Rangers out of jealousy. Possibility of RFC supporters understanding and accepting actual reasons for club's demise - 0%.

Utterly deluded, totally uninterested in reality and determined to wreak maximum damage on everyone else in the Scottish game for offences none of them have committed. I'd love to think Bendarroch represented a small minority of the RFC support but if this thread has demonstrated anything, it's that he's one of the relatively sane ones.

Tell you what, despite appearing biologically human, a lot of Rangers fans don't half act like they've just arrived from some newly-discovered continent where the concepts of "shame", "remorse" and "humility" are yet to be invented.

I'd have thought it's fairly simple: if they're the same entity, HMRC will be kicking their door down looking for the ninety four million quid Rangers owe them. If HMRC do show up, you can be sure every Rangers fan currently parsing the difference between club and company will be shouting "Rangers FC? They moved out ages ago, we're The Rangers" at the tops of their voices.

Headshot! +100pts

Let's pause and have a think about whether "A plc did not pay a bill" is an accurate description of what actually happened. Is it? That description doesn't include the words "intentionally", "contracted services" or "in the full knowledge that the club would never be able to pay for them". Amazingly, it doesn't even contain the words "Rangers FC". "A plc"? How is it possible to describe how Rangers FC intentionally contracted services from the Scottish Ambulance Service in the full knowledge that the club would never be able to pay for them, without using these or similar phrases? It's harder, not easier, to describe that scenario in neutral, mistakes-were-made language. Clay's comment is childish and distasteful, but let's keep our boiling outrage in perspective here, eh? I don't like that kind of chat, but we are talking about the actions of "A plc" that may or may not have failed to deliver a sum of money owing to the Treasury, whether accidentally or by design.

Whenever The People are faced with a choice between... a) Accepting Rangers' and their supporters' very well-documented problems with financial skullduggery, threats and intimidation or b) Hallucinating a massive, secret anti-Rangers conspiracy involving enormous chunks of the media and the political and football establishments, possibly with the clandestine assistance of the Illuminati, the CIA, the Mafia, Fidel Castro,and some seven-foot-tall space lizards from Venus ...You can be sure that The People will soon discover all kinds of suspiciously reptilian behaviour in anyone who dares to discuss all the financial skullduggery, threats and intimidation. If the facts don't match up with their own delusional beliefs about their scamming club and its lunatic supporters then by God, the facts will be spray-painted and panel-beaten until they damn well look like they could match up. Sort of. Maybe. Thus, Graham Spiers = space lizard journalist working to destroy Rangers. QED.

Looks like Spiers has joined the vast anti-Rangers conspiracy... http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/opinion/spiers-on-sport-coming-under-threat-for-criticising-rangers.1351601156 Why does he no' talk about threats to Nacho Novo, eh? Must have an agenda...

If a future football historian ever asks why the club known as Rangers FC keeled over and died, this would be a nutshell example. It's a hilarious irony. If you want thousands of Rangers fans to go through all your statements with a fine-toothed comb looking for inaccuracies or misrepresentations, then all you need to do is criticise Rangers in a newspaper. If you want thousands of Rangers fans to investigate your past and highlight any dubious behaviours, then you should criticise Rangers in a newspaper. If you want thousands of Rangers fans to engage you in a feriocious, angry and highly partisan argument, you should criticise Rangers in a newspaper. If you criticise Rangers in a newspaper, they won't let you rest until they've stripped you down to the bare bones. No effort or expense is too much, in pursuit of journalists. On the other hand - if you want thousands of Rangers fans to believe everything you say without question, or to sing your praises, or if you just want them to give you vast sums of money, the way to do it is to buy Rangers. If you do that, you invest prudently or you can run the club into the ground by treating it like your piggy bank - it doesn't really matter one way or the other. You can steal directly out of their pockets while basically announcing I am stealing directly out of your pockets, and they won't complain, so long as the team wins. And that's why their old club is dead, and the new one looking like a risky proposition. I was thinking about this the other day - would anyone else say that Rangers fans are pretty much unique in this Swallow, Swallow attitude, in European football? I can't think of any other large supporters group who have been suckered again and again and again, yet still come back every time more enthusiastically begging for the chance to be ripped off again. Not even in Italy.

Secret societies - popular with self-important closet cases who confuse "hanging around with like-minded tits" with "being special and/or important". Militant ethnoreligious clubs - popular with people whose lives are so devoid of achievement that their religious affiliation, nationality and/or ethnicity is also their highest personal achievement. It's not always this way, but in my experience these fruity little clubs tend to attract fannies like a spewed-up kebab attracts seagulls.

Good God. There's plenty to criticize Celtic for, but let's not kid ourselves - every club in the SPL would crawl ten miles through a sewer wearing Sevco strips for a couple of million quid extra a year, and everybody knows it. It's a shite state of affairs, but there it is.

Cheers - see above.