If they went over they went over. I'll get my popcorn and bucket of pepsi.

According to the BBC;
"The penalty, which includes a £5,000 fine, relates to six separate payments totalling £14,700, which were not declared to the Rugby Football League."

This is terrible news, 2 points deducted, it should have been 20 points!

A leopard never changes its spots

When did the “live” salary cap rules come in? I thought this sort of cheating was impossible now because all clubs finances were monitored for salary cap breaches? Seems odd that cheating in 2017 takes over a year to identify and punish.

Reading the report I take it as that it was "undeclared" therefore it wouldn't appear as "live".

It's not the 1st time they have fallen foul with regards cheating the salary cap, therefore I surprised it's not more points deducted.

Will they be stripped of the SL title when their opportunity to appeal has passed, a a Melbourne?
We’ve got a team who won the Grand Final who were in breach of the salary cap at that time.
Reading between the lines, although we have a live cap these payments were not declared by the club, so were not taken into account at the time. I’m guessing it’s similar to the Salford situation when payments were made to players via other companies associated with the club and then discovered later, but I’m just speculating.

I spoke to lennegan when he was at London as chairman and he said that he and his family were disgusted with Wigans breaches(Previous ones).

Now he has overseen cheating. Its in the Pies DNA

I don't know how this affects things but allegedly the payments were for agent fees and flight allowances (sounds farfetched to me) and they argued that they shouldn't count on the cap and so it had to go before an independent tribunal contributing to the delay.

No because the payments relate to the 2017 season in which Wigan won nothing.

Leeds won it?

LOL

RFL has some answering to regarding thisWhen formally charged, Wigan’s first formal response to the charges was to admit them as breaches caused by administrative error and disruptive mitigating circumstances.

At no stage did Wigan respond to the charges with a not-guilty response.

Wigan were not offered an Agreed Decision by the RFL, as expected in the rules, before the Tribunal was arranged. Had this been offered earlier in the process, as provided for in the RFL Rules & Regulations, Wigan would have had the opportunity to research precedents and would almost certainly have accepted an Agreed Decision involving no points deduction, as offered at the last minute at the door of the Tribunal but with a substantial fine and costs.

The RFL legal team at the Tribunal represented the breaches as “serious” on a scale from “minor” to “serious” to “exceptional” in requesting a serious penalty from the Tribunal and cited Wigan’s breaches in 2004 (2 points deduction) and 2005 (4 points deduction) as relevant to consider.
'"

Seems more like an oversight or a misunderstanding of the legislation rather than anything malicious or 'cheating' to me.
Probably similar to what happened to Bradford when they were found to have breached the cap, and that was actually in a year where Bradford won the GF.

You have to laugh at the timing of it though. The RFL statement says that the decision was reached last Thursday. So they've waited until now, the eve of the new season kicking off, to announce it

The salary cap should be increased to £3m

Before this gets much more sanctimonious these kinds of error are not uncomon and can hardly be seen as a deliberate attempt to cheat. The club statement is quite clear on what went wrong and it looks like an appeal would have a good chance of sucess in that the RFL has breached its own opperating proceedures. A legal challenge can be expected if not only because others have been treated differently for the same types of error. One worry is that this might become the standard and then many clubs could be worried.