Direct chain from Celtic’s payment to NHS GGC and their payment back to the Celtic SLA: SED & SFA’s involvement

Disposition by The Scottish Ministers in favour of Celtic PLC: 29 June 2006

Source doc

FOI response from NHS GGC on payments to The Lennoxtown Initiative

Source doc

The Lennoxtown Initiative Accounts for year ending 31 March 2007

The Evidence Trail

The first two graphics above are the relevant sections of the ‘Disposition by The Scottish Ministers in favour of Celtic PLC’ showing settlement of £493,000 for the Lennoxtown transaction dated 29th June 2006.

Next graphic is response by NHS GGC to a FoI asking what ‘donations’ were made by the latter party to The Lennoxtown Initiative ‘charity’.  £463,000 was paid November 2006.

The last graphic is an excerpt from The Lennoxtown Initiative accounts for the year ending 31st March 2007. Showing that NHS GGC paid into The Lennoxtown Initiative the sum of £464,333 specifically for the Celtic SLA.

The NHS GGC paid that money in November 2006. So only 4 months after Celtic paid for the Lennoxtown training ground, the money was back sitting for Celtic PLC in The Lennoxtown Initiative. 

Purpose of The Lennoxtown Initiative

The above are the stated objectives of The Lennoxtown Initiative in their Memorandum and Articles of Association. As can be seen, the claimed reason for the setting up of the charity was to mitigate the loss of employment with the closing of the Lennox Castle Hospital.

The purposes of the Celtic SLA were to work with schools throughout East Dunbartonshire. So how is this compatible with a charity focused narrowly on Lennoxtown and it’s residents? If it was only for the Lennoxtown schools:

Lennoxtown Primary School

St Machan’s Primary School

maybe that would look bad laundering £464,333 through just 2 small primary schools. So it had to be widened but then it went beyond the constraints of The Lennoxtown Initiative’ stated objectives.

This is a mote point because the corruption doesn’t really depend on their objectives. It’s in the act of recycling the funds back to Celtic. Although the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator [OSCR] info@oscr.org.uk should be informed of the use of a charity to facilitate the fraud. The Lennoxtown Initiative number is SC221335.

Questions also need to be asked of other parties:

Scottish Enterprise

The graphic above is an excerpt from The Lennoxtown Initiative accounts for year ending 31 March 2008 showing a payment by Scottish Enterprise Dunbartonshire into the Celtic SLA.

By way of  FoIs ask:

1. Why did SE Dunbartonshire in the year ending 31st March 2008 also chip in £253,000 to the Celtic SLA?

2. Why was the publicly funded ‘Enterprise’ quango for Dunbartonshire supposedly created to encourage companies, hence use of the word ‘Enterprise’, funding an operational Celtic SLA schools program on health & sport? Is this not the purview of Education & Health ministers?

3. We need minutes of meetings where the Celtic SLA was discussed, when did they first meet Celtic PLC or The Lennoxtown Initiative or NHS GGS or EDC representatives.

4. Who was running the SE Dunbartonshire management team when this was happening and how & why was the budget allocated.

SFA Involvement

This graphic is an excerpt from an East Dunbartonshire Council Policy and Resources Committee document dated 31 January 2008:

Source doc

The SFA was involved with the Celtic SLA.

Questions:

1. Did the SFA know of or ask questions of how the Celtic SLA was being funded? If they didn’t ask they were being naive. Did they think the funds just came out of the air? 

2. Was it any of Celtic’s SFA representatives that requested the SFA’s involvement.

3. Surely the SFA control any schools program involving football and not an individual club?

4. When did the SFA’s involvement start in the Celtic SLA?

5. What was the SFA’s contribution to the Celtic SLA? Was it enormous resources of Sporting Integrity or has that resource been used up?

The Co-operative Bank Angle

It should also be noted that the Lennoxtown land, acquired in the fashion above, has been used as and continues to be used as a security by Celtic PLC for loans & overdraft from The Co-Operative Bank. So as well as benefiting from getting the land for free, it was used to get low interest loans & overdraft:

And press reports in January said Lennoxtown was not part of the EU State Aid case?

The Lennoxtown Initiative was about jobs?

Why, when The Lennoxtown Initiative was set-up to increase employment in the area, were the 3 full-time employees of the charity sacked in 2011 to save money while the Celtic SLA was still being paid until 2014, for a three further years? 

Thanks to the VB guys for the EDC Policy and Resources Committee doc & newspaper article above.

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