Jamie Langley

Quote: sgtwilko "Yeah but you cheated. You cheated the system that's put in place to promote an even playing field and good spirt within the game. your club had no respect for those principles and chose to ignore the rules in greed of success. that must be a lovely feeling.
You know, when the history books come to be written, naïve comments like that will probably look rather silly.

Although I've flogged it to death on here, I suppose one more time seems necessary

The Bulls' breach was because (it appears) a sizeable proportion of Iestyn Harris' earnings came from sale of his image rights by his personal service company to pub operator Publico. Provided such outfits are an independent third party (as defined in the RFL Operational Rules) not "connected" with the club, such earnings fall outside the cap. Now for some reason - the tale I heard at the time was because of a small one-off advert in a programme, but I suspect other factors may have been at play - the Salary Cap Auditor ruled that Publico was actually "Connected" with the Bulls and therefore what they were paying his PSC counted as salary cap earnings. My understanding is that the club contested this (I won't go into details on here), but to no avail.

Now this arrangement was, and is, used by other players at other clubs too. Indeed, IIRC the self-same Mr Harris was "sponsored by Tissot" when he played for Leeds. I rather suspect that was a similar image rights deal, and if so presumably Harris' agent set this up with Tissot with the club not being at all involved, since no salary cap issues seem to have arisen. Maybe Harris felt so well off as a result that he decided he could play for Leeds for less than he might otherwise have, thereby allowing Leeds more cpa space...who knows? Maybe none of this happened. It must remain conjecture I guess. But Scully's deal with Gillette certainly was of this nature, as I understand it. And these are just two high-profile examples. What is less clear is why the Harris arrangement when at Bulls seems to have been treated differently by the RFL to everyone else. Presumably the salary cap auditor must have felt there were sufficient distinctions?

It is also clear that a main reason for the RFL bringing in the "real-time" salary cap was because - as the Bulls rightly pointed out - the breach (as they deemed it) for year 1 was not ruled on by the RFL until well over half way through the season of year 2. This meant that not only did the club have no opportunity to fix the issue in year 1, it was also far too late to fix it in year 2.

So, this was the "cheating" that the Bulls were seen as engaging in by the likes of you. Seems to me what they did was no different to others clubs. I also hear various tales, hearsay or whatever, suggesting that various other clubs have engaged in practices contrary to the cap, but which were not picked up on. Some surprising ones too, where (if true) things are less whiter than white than people might have us believe. Folk conjecture on these boards all the time - someone mentioned the ubiquitous brown envelope on a thread on the VT earlier, for example. But again, all this remains hearsay, at least until the autobiographies come out.

And also, the current big issue of club-paid image rights and employee benefit trust payments is in my view a blatant means of acting not in the spirit of the cap. Leeds, for example, are a club who admit to having used both devices, and refer to the tax exposure in their published accounts as a contingent liability. The "grossing-up" that any tax settlement would result in would appear to me be a retrospective breach of the salary cap for any club spending at or near the cap.

You made a statement above which is not that far short of defamation, but at the very least displays breathtaking naïvity and partisanship. As I said, I suspect the history books will make interesting reading - over this, and over the whole Harrisgate debacle generally. The villains are not always entirely where you expect.

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