As Resolution 12 founders are Lawwell and the PLC Fit for Celtic?

In the event that, three months from now, we are faced with a case that is dead in the water with no meaningful answers, we should not miss our targets

Repeating yourself too often is rarely a good thing. “You can say that again”, I hear you cry, but I'll resist.

Only yesterday, I was expressing my belief that the efforts to have a UEFA investigation opened into possible misconduct by the SFA in allowing Rangers to be entered into the 2011 Champions League, (having failed to meet the Financial Fair Play criteria set out by European football's umbrella body) were almost certainly doomed to failure.

I need not reiterate my concerns as you can read them, if you wish.

However, tonight's hasty announcement from “Brogan, Rogan, Trevino & Hogan” (not a firm of solicitors but an individual Celtic fan) must surely have been greeted with the thunder of jaws dropping and heads slapping across the Celtic community.

(I will state now that this is not an attack on BRTH, Auldheid, Canalamar or any of the other people genuinely trying to pursue justice on this matter. I don't know their backgrounds but neither do I doubt their goods intentions – you may have to jump to the end of this piece for that to become clear.)

This was an urgent request for any shareholders willing to be named by the solicitors claiming to represent them to sign a mandate authorising their names to be used.

It is not often I agree with Stewart Regan but it is quite proper for an organisation to decline to answer questions from anonymous sources. Anonymity is for bloggers and social media users (though the owner of one site attempted to use this blogger's preference for using a pseudonym in an attempt to silence criticism).

Refuting Regan's argument, BRTH stated: “This is not so, as the organisation Regan heads up has been written to by a large commercial firm of solicitors who have clearly advised that they act on behalf of a distinct class of people, namely shareholders in Celtic PLC who signed up to and supported Res 12 at the 2013 AGM.”

There are a number of problems with that statement.

Firstly, the size of the legal firm is irrelevant. Any legal firm registered with the Law Society of Scotland is as competent to act as any other, large or small, and can be expected to operate to the same professional and ethical standards.

“We've got a big firm behind us” may be useful in terms of their resources and expertise but it means nothing in terms of legitimacy.

Secondly, the relevance of “a distinct class of people” is obscure. Perhaps the Resolutioners are trying to imply that some sort of class action is taking place. That would be inaccurate – they are requesting information that the SFA does not appear to be compelled to give and, indeed, may argue that they are compelled to withhold on the grounds of confidentiality.

For this, they would need only cite the Procedural Rules Governing the UEFA Club Financial Control Body:

“Article 10  – Confidentiality
Members of the CFCB  ensure complete confidentiality of all facts that come to their attention in the course of  their duties and, in  particular, refrain from divulging the contents of deliberations.”

That alone would likely be sufficient justification for the SFA to decline to divulge any information that may relate to a potential investigation that the Resolutioners are currently seeking to initiate.

Really, would ANY organisation divulge potentially confidential information that may lead to a damages action and even criminal proceedings, to an unnamed group of people? Logically, it would only take a similar group of shareholders of any club (including Celtic) to request that the SFA refuse to engage with them, whether that would mean a hearing before a sheriff or simply a meeting of the SFA Board (of which Peter Lawwell is a member).

Given that the member clubs are competent to submit complaints, it is not at all clear that an unnamed “class of people” has any greater legitimacy than “a bunch of guys”.

This, of course, gives the SFA any number of additional get-outs, the most obvious being avoidance or prevarication, with any UEFA investigation being time-barred by the end of June this year – roughly 12 weeks.

The implications of this are profound. Any lawyers would surely advise the SFA not to answer any questions that could leave them open to civil or criminal action, never mind liable to UEFA or FIFA sanctions.

In the circumstances, the SFA would seem to have every reason to keep schtum. However, there is another very clear available tactic.

For any normal legal request, it is usually considered reasonable to allow for ten working days for a reply. If we presume that the Resolutioners must wait two weeks for all the mandates to be received – April 1st – it would be likely that any reply would not be received before April 15th.

This would be unlikely to contain any meaningful answers. Rather, it would most probably be a legal opinion that the SFA did not have to respond to the Resolutioners, according to their rules, and even that SFA rules either did not allow – or actually prohibited – the Association from dealing with the inquiry (something that would be virtually impossible, were Celtic or any member club to make similar representations).

Alternatively, if it was deemed that the SFA should respond, the lawyers would most likely ask for clarification on a number of points, requiring the Resolutioners' lawyers to respond with due diligence – meaning that they could not simply reply over a coffee break but take reasonable time to ensure that they were meeting all of their professional duties.

The timeline is now at Friday, 29th April before the SFA have received their first response telling them why they should address the points made. Another round of letters would take us to Friday 13th May.

Do you see where this is going?

With the added complication of an unlikely UEFA investigation being requested at the same time, the SFA can kill this through legal letters and delays until the UEFA Statute of Limitations has passed.

And all this calls even further into question the Celtic board's request that the shareholders take action first. You could believe that these millionaires with their years of corporate experience and high-powered lawyers haven't spotted the obvious flaws that an independent blogger has identified.

In that case, you could also consider replacing the buttons up your back with Velcro.

Of course, there may be something I am missing. I've been wrong before and told I was wrong even more often – notably when I was saying that Peter Lawwell and the Celtic board were overseeing managed decline of the club.

I'm only basing my judgement on my personal experience and appreciation of the facts.

I referred yesterday to a sense of “betrayal”. The Resolutioners have put their faith in the Chief Executive and the Celtic PLC board. They have been strongly encouraged in that and that trust should neither be seen as a character flaw nor a reflection on their individual abilities.

They have largely been (rightly) lauded for their efforts, even if refusing to consider that the people they have been urged to trust – who have, no doubt, convincingly assured them of their own good intentions – appears to have been a miscalculation.

But the most burning question remains: did the Celtic board, in any of their regular “supportive” meetings, point out the potential flaws that it has now taken this blogger approximately 40 minutes to write?

If not, and as seems almost inevitable, their years of collective efforts come to nought, will the Resolutioners then re-evaluate their faith in the people they have been defending? Will they and other Celtic fans stand by and watch their endeavours ridiculed?

We should all hope that this article is the most complete waste of less than an hour of a blogger's time that has ever been expended; that the SFA will offer full transparency – that they will offer a convincing response disclaiming wrongdoing or that UEFA sanctions will be brought to bear.

And that would be my preferred option – justice, integrity and a game I can believe in.

In the event that, three months from now, we are faced with a case that is dead in the water with no meaningful answers, we should not miss our targets. The SFA may not be fit for purpose – but are the PLC board and Chief Executive fit for Celtic?

Surely they won't fool the Children of the Resolution

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

I have a professional contact, who loves to point out how hard she works. And she does work hard, too, emails from the early hours backing up her assertion that she spends most of the day at her PC.


But – it's a big one – she's hopelessly, haplessly inefficient. One of the reasons that she works so hard is that she has no concept of processes. And she rebuffs any suggestion that she might do things differently because she has always done things this way and therefore it is right.

And that impacts on me, as well as everyone who works with her. If I need information, she can't give it to me when I need it. She does everything strictly in the order that it comes up, with no view to time sensitivity, relative importance, knock-on effects, etc.

In short, if she worked less hard and was more receptive to the view that she might take a different tack, my life would be easier and her strong work ethic would be a source of admiration from me rather than frustration, noting her apparent assumption that she is doing things the only possible way.

I admire hard work where it is necessary or achieves a better result than a less industrious approach but I'm always wary of people who praise sweat for its own sake, when approaching a problem from a different angle might have been more effective.

So I am ready for brickbats from some quarters if I do not lavish unqualified praise on those who are working hard for a result on behalf of Celtic that they are highly unlikely to achieve.

And so we come to the hard-working people who are trying to pursue the aims of the now-infamous Resolution 12.

In short, Resolution 12 was put to the Celtic AGM and withdrawn because the majority shareholders indicated that they intended to vote it down. Had it been passed, it would have required the board to refer the Scottish Football Association's decision to submit Rangers' application to play in the Champions League to the UEFA Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) to examine what appeared to be a breach of the rules on Financial Fair Play.

Specifically, that, as Rangers had not paid their tax bill in 2011, they should not have been allowed to participate in any UEFA competition.

By all accounts, the main protagonists, notably “Auldheid” and “Brogan, Rogan, Trevino and Hogan” of Celtic Quick News fame put forward a carefully-researched proposal, backed by as much evidence and legal advice as could be reasonably available to them.

However, one of the notable things about AGMs in recent years has been that they are largely a charade, as far as fans being able to use their shareholdings to influence the direction of the club. Simply put, any policy that the directors and major shareholders dislike can be voted down.

So those proposing Resolution 12 had to rely on their carefully-researched case persuading the big hitters at the club that it was in their interests to act.

And that could only be based on another assumption – that those who wield power at Celtic Park view their interests and those of the club in the same way as the overwhelming majority of fans.

It is here that the pragmatism of their efforts can be called into question. CQN has long been the site most loudly banging the drum for the corporate “plan”, and Peter Lawwell's strategy for achieving it. And all the evidence to date seems to show that the Resolution 12 proponents maintain an unshakable faith in the integrity and good faith of those running the club.

With due respect to Auldheid and BRTH, that confidence is not universally shared amongst supporters.

The result is the now farcical situation whereby the Resolution 12 supporters, having invested years of effort in trying to pursue sporting integrity are defending a board that refuses to even request an investigation into the possibility that the club was cheated out of a chance to compete in the Champions League, and denied potential earnings of up to £15 million.

“In the intervening period of time, there have been numerous meetings and consistent correspondence between those shareholders and officials of Celtic PLC, all with a view to furthering the aims of Res 12, and there is no doubt that the Celtic board have played a full part in taking the resolution to where it now stands,” they have claimed, omitting to mention that “playing a full part” would have involved Celtic, as a member club, formally requesting action by the SFA, the absence of which would logically dictate that a formal complaint would be made to UEFA.

“Working together, the board and the shareholders have seen to it that formal letters of enquiry have been sent to the SFA, together with various pieces of documentation and supporting evidence.

“Through the shareholders’ lawyers, the SFA were asked to answer specific detailed questions in relation to their procedures, however the SFA responded by saying they would not answer any questions other than through the “member club” i.e. the board of Celtic PLC.”

Throughout the process, the board of Celtic PLC have consistently failed to exercise their rights as a member club, knowing full well that their refusal to act allowed the SFA the only get-out in a situation that was at best demonstrative of incompetence and at worst corruption.

Instead, the club have insisted that the shareholders should pursue any action.

It beggars belief that meetings where the club's representatives demonstrated verbal support that was inconsistent with their inaction should be seen as facilitating anything. The shareholders of any company are not required to act in the interests of the board; the case is quite the reverse.

For the CFCB to open an inquiry, its members would almost certainly have to consider that a group of minority shareholders, without authorisation from the board of directors of the club or any resolution passed at AGM were somehow legitimate stakeholders in representing the club.

There is little to support that position. Does anyone really imagine that UEFA would set a precedent of allowing any minority group with a handful of shares to precipitate the machinations of their investigative and disciplinary processes?

Theoretically, the CFCB could decide, unilaterally, to open a case but in the absence of a complaint from the allegedly aggrieved party, to do so would be a remarkable decision.

Which takes us back to assumptions and Occam's Razor, quoted at the top of this piece. When business people are reported to hold private views that are in direct conflict with their actions, it can be assumed that their actions are a more accurate indication of their intentions.

And when a club declines to take a complaint, where it appears that it has unfairly incurred a loss, it requires fewest assumptions to conclude that its representatives do not wish to have the outcome that such a complaint might bring about.

We could only speculate on their motives. But we can state with certainty that the club has not pursued its interests in this matter and infer why that might be.

In the meantime, the shareholders have been left to submit a complaint that the CFCB has no responsibility to consider and – crucially – resolve the entire matter before July 2016, when its own statute of limitations on this issue would run out.

In other words, the shareholders will almost certainly be rebuffed and the board will then say, “Sorry, but it's too late to do anything now.”

If that scenario comes to pass – and, in the absence of direct fan pressure on the board, it is difficult to see how it will be avoided – we will have been witness to one of the greatest betrayals in football history.

Of course, that last assertion would prove outrageous, if the board can be relied on to act in good faith, in pursuit of the club's best interests, fairness to its fans and sporting integrity.

Can we assume that to be the case?--