Agreed. See my comment to Gareth above.

I'll say we'll be alright, especially if the clubs auditors haven't picked up on this and haven't already said anything to HMRC.

Doesn't quite work that way, cos it looks like the clubs that availed themselves of this took a calculated risk, probably working WITH their tax advisers who usually tend also to be the auditors. And the auditors would not report something of this nature to HMRC - there are pretty limited circumstances in which they have an obligation to report things, usually involving money laundering.

I'd still be surprised if it affected you though, and anyway you have other safer opportunities for stretching the cap if you need to.

Had a word with the gaffer this morining, HMRC are investigating the amounts we pay our players for their image rights. HMRC want 15% of the players salary to become their image rights (exempts from PAYE&NIC) so obviously we pay them more and they want us to pay nic & paye on the difference between the current image rights percentage to one that has been agreed by the club and the revenue. A deal could be done with the revenue & the clubs to go back a certain number of years.

Surprised me as did not for one minute think you guys would be implicated. If what you say is true, guess you'll have to take some tips from us about how to respond to being labelled salary cap cheats!

i dont know whether it is us or not, but i'm presuming it is as we were mentioned in the article. Hardly cheating though is it?

But it is against "the spirit of the cap" isn't it?

I wonder what will happen to the players who are STILL under contract to a club who have image rights and offshore accounts as part of their current contracts.

I can't wait to see the pompous Mr. Hetherington squeal.

It would be , cos would mean that you had paid more to players than the salary cap (if you were at the cap). No different to what clubs already punished for breaches did. But, as I said, I'd still be very surprised if Leeds were implicated - your admin seems smarter than that.

That's easy. The RFL will give them a dispensation, like they did to Wigan a while ago?

It is against the spirit of the cap but i still disagree with it as the RFL will have known about these payments. IIRC the RFL will only go back to December 2007 to investigate sc matters?

It could mean a bit of a messy period with the clubs in question, as their players will want rises as they'll be getting less due to their loss in extra paye & nic.

Defo against spirit, and likely the letter, so the charges of cheating would still be made by fans of clubs not implicated. But I tend to agree with you - its not as if the SC auditor was unaware of the payments so the RFL would find it hard to impose retrospective penalties - even if they were minded to.

I suspect the real implications will be retrospective tax bills and tax penalties for clubs involved, higher costs in the interim "messy period", as you say, and then reduced packages available for overseas superstars for the future which may well reduce their flow from the NRL.

Maybe this is one of the reasons GH has been leaving the so called "wiggle" room in the cap for the last few years?