Good morning,
I am in true Cyril Fletcher style indebted to HH reader and gentleman Tweeter, @RicciAshoori who has brought to my attention a fascinating twist in the whole Arry Redschnapps & HMRC fiasco.
Some of the information I can share with you is taken from a web site called http://thestory.ie/ a site with a tag line of ‘in search of transparency’. Well if this article is anything to go by they are very close to earning their Junior X-Ray Specs Badge.
The information I’m unable share with you are documents that are probably still subject to a Court Order issued by Southwark Crown Court. So what I’ll do for clarity is simply lift salient chunks of the thestory.ie article and if you want to go a hunting for more it’s far from difficult to find.
“The investigation is part of ‘Operation Apprentice’ a long standing investigation into alleged football corruption.
In 2007, then Portsmouth chief executive Peter Storrie was arrested — along with then manager Harry Redknapp, then club owner Milan Mandaric (now owner of Sheffield Wednesday), agent Willie McKay and former Portsmouth player Amdy Faye — over allegations of corruption. The five men were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting.
Last year Redknapp, who is the current manager at Tottenham, was charged with “two counts of cheating the public revenue of an estimated £40,000 after voluntarily attending London’s Bishopsgate police station”.
According to The Independent:
Charges concerned two payments, totalling 295,000 US dollars, alleged to have been made from Mandaric to Redknapp via a bank account in Monaco, evading the tax and National Insurance contributions due between April 1, 2002 and November 28, 2007.
Mandaric, now chairman of Leicester, was charged with tax evasion relating to the payment of 295,000 US dollars to another person via a Monaco bank account, evading tax and National Insurance.
Storrie was charged with concealing a signing-on fee for ex-Portsmouth player Amdy Faye by paying it into the midfielder’s bank account.
The allegation related to the transfer of Faye from Auxerre to Fratton Park for £1.5million in August 2003.
For his part, Redknapp sought to have the case against him dismissed in November last year.
But according to these court documents, the Crown Prosecution Service sought the assistance of the US Department of Justice in September 2010 relating to the transfer of $295,000 from the Florida bank account of a company called First Star International to an account held by Redknapp in Monaco.
Also included in a list given by the CPS was one payment by “Rosie 47? of $207,433.73 on February 12, 2008 to Redknapp. This payment was two months after he was arrested in November 2007. The source of another lodgment in June 2002, for $145,000, is unclear.
The CPS requested US authorities to assist them in obtaining information from the bank used by First Star International – the City National Bank of Florida.“
The content of those documents I am unprepared to share on this blog, but as I say, they are out there.
We’ll have a caption comp later :daumen:
An old school football manager likes brown paper bags. Bloody hell, someone fetch me a glass of water for the shock. The only thing that surprises me is that the amount of money is so small.
If ‘Dimbleby of the Yard’ had put as much effort into investigating corruption in the Met and illegal goings-on at Murdoch towers as they have into Harry’s £40k, we’d all be looking at the top brass in the Police doing a ten stretch.
Ditto, the banks… The guardian ran a piece two years ago (see link below) about a whistleblower at Barclays dishing the dirt on a whole section at Canary Wharf dedicated to UK tax evasion. The bank had made over £1bn (That’s One Billion… Or One Thousand Million pounds) in securing dodgy deals for it’s clients – The major companies of Britain. The government response (Not the current shower, the last lot) was to tighten up the rules to prevent whistleblowers.
The truth is that they’re all bent out there… Up to their bloody necks in it. We get screwed on a daily basis by those entrusted to protect us and serve us and until they start rounding up a few of those f***ers, I’m not going to lose sleep over a football manager tucking a bit in the kitty. To do so would make me a hypocrite for every time I’d paid someone cash to do a job or claimed a meal with the wife on the company.
If Harry gets dislodged it should be for football matters only and that’s a different post and discussion.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
Have you lost your mind, Astro?! You’re talking far too much good sense, again… ;)
The link to the Guardian pice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/19/new-barclays-tax-whistleblower-claims
good morning all, i can think of many other worse offenders than our harry, ken bates comes to mind and plenty more cretins like him why don’t they investigate this bloody lot.
Harry, why do you always give me homework – I have enough to read as it is. If he is guilty and goes down, can you do a special T-shirt?
Everybody talking about what a great squad we have at the squad in relation to Harry’s achievements at the club should perhaps look at the reality of the situation: we have a bloated squad full of dead wood which we can’t shift thanks in no minor part to Harry’s activity in the transfer market since he came here.
Who has he signed?
Defoe – gone downhill badly
Crouch – no comment necessary
Keane – we made a tidy 20m out of him and instead of laughing at the scousers for their folly, we went and signed him back and put him on our highest wage bracket – great work
Palacios – Admittedly was great, now being pushed out by Harry
Pienaar – only bought because he was going cheap
Krancjar – again only bought because he was going cheap. Good player confusingly not trusted by Harry
VDV – well documented – NOT Harry’s signing
Sandro – Ditto. Harry hadn’t seen him play and went through the first half of the season in the same state of self-inflicted myopica through not selecting him.
FriedelIf he wasn’t convinced with Gomes, why not sell him and get someone capable of being number one?
GallasAlright, I’ll give him that one
So please stop talking about how much Redknapp has improved the squad. For the most part his signings have flopped. And his targets seem even worse – David Beckham, Joe Cole, etc etc, always old boys, triffic top top boys, way way past it. He is out of his depth in the transfer market and it actually makes me pine somewhat for the maligned director of football role. At least Commoli mixed up his Bentleys with a Modric / Bale / Assou-Ekotto etc.
None of which has to do with this court business, of which I don’t really understand or care about that much. Whatever happens I very much doubt he will be doing bird, either way he will be fucking off to another job next year anyway, so we are stuck with him for now and that’s it really.
Yep to everything there. Add Bassong to that too.
Yeah, forgot about him, had a feeling there were more!
To be honest I don’t recall Defoe ever being that good to go downhill. He was third or fourth choice under Jol, and what’s changed since?
Crouch put us in CL, against ManC and Young Boys. Also he is a good substitute as a tactical move.
Keane was a good signing in terms of squad-mentality at the time. All in all we got good ROI on him. Anyway he should be on free transfer by now.
Perhaps Redknapp could substitute Crouch for himself in the court room, tactically.
Crouch scored one important goal and a couple of others against a team of part timers we should have been beating anyway. But guess what? That’s his job – he’s a striker. He’s just not very good at it, as his overall goals / starts ratio confirms. Last year he was primarily of use in defending corners and “tactically” he was employed when Harry decided he didn’t want us to waste any time playing with the ball in midfield.
Keane was signed because somehow our medics didn’t spot that Defoe had come back with a broken foot!! You couldn’t make it up!
crouch put us in cl?, no he didnt u moron, do you realise that the CL wasnt a one game play off at city, we actually managed , even with the hinderence of mr crouch to actually win a lot of games before no37, go and wank over “crouchies” FOUR FUCKING LEAGUE GOALS LAST SEASON U TWAT,IN OVER 30 GAMES!.So sick of the crouch put us in CL bollix, it hit him in the face, he knew nothing about it.