Are Laws Only For The Little People?

Sir Isaac Newton told us why
An apple falls down from the sky
And from this fact it's very plain
That other objects do the same...

But.
If it was up to the courts to rule on the Laws of Gravity, we'd probably spend years hearing legal arguments that an apple falls from the ground up to the tree.

Up until recently I thought that I was more or less keeping in touch with the general shape of the developments as Rangers FC heads into perdition as a well-deserved consequence of the scandalous running of the club for at least the last twenty years. The charge sheet includes three separate instances of tax fraud which could total nearly one hundred million pounds in unpaid monies to the Treasury. It also includes routinely running up a preposterous level of debt with no serious prospects of repaying it other than by adding it to the already over-extended overdraft of Murray International Holdings, a liability which eventually exceeded one billion pounds and played its part in the collapse of the Bank of Scotland and its subsequent bail-out, funded by the UK tax-payers. We're looking at one of the biggest corporate scandals in Scottish business history. One would be forgiven for expecting jail sentences to have been handed down to the guilty parties long before now.

And yet I'm beginning to feel that this whole case is becoming too Pythonesque to make any sense. The latest bizarre twist is the surreal sight of the Administrators of Rangers FC applying to the Court of Session to be appointed ... the Administrators of Rangers!
It's particularly frustrating to me that there seems to be very little overlap between easily understood, natural justice and the immensely complicated procedures of the Law.

Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds have been ripped off by various parties involved with Rangers FC and MIH and it looks increasingly likely that those responsible for these scams are still in with a shout of getting something out of it, even if Rangers itself goes down the pan.
Every time that it looks as if anyone is going to get their comeuppance, another bizarre legal wheeze appears out of thin air, in defiance of all common sense, which muddies the waters and makes it appear that there is always a possible escape route for the shameless and the dishonourable. Amidst the carnage of the revelations about how Rangers FC has been conducting its business, one of the club's former directors is still proposing that he will play a leading role in taking the wreckage for which he is partly responsible and turning it into a successful business after it has been liquidated. There has not been one word from Mr Paul Murray about his moral duty to repay the colossal debts which the club ran up under his stewardship; not a single syllable to suggest that he feels the slightest shame about his part in the reckless business practice of the directors' board of which he was a member. No repentance, no remorse, no sign of a guilty conscience.

I have got more money than the likes of David Murray, who was knighted for services to business. Unlike Sir David, I am not in debt to the tune of six hundred million pounds. Yet he is the one who is still living like a king. An entire bank went to the wall to enable that man to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle to which he has accustomed himself. And he's not even in the picture yet, as far as the Law is concerned!

The Law is taking an eternity to get its act together. Somehow, when tasked with a case in which somebody pursues his own objectives by spending hundreds of millions of pounds of other people's money, m'learned friends spend months and years dragging out a tortuously slow series of procedures. They forensically examine every conceivable interpretation of every obscure contention. It is as if their primary objective is to find the route by which the most blatant wrongdoing can turn out to be perfectly legal. And to charge by the hour as they proceed at a glacial pace.
Now, for the first time, I'm genuinely beginning to fear that a fix is in whereby there will once again be no punishment for the villains of the piece while the decent, honest little guys will be the only victims (cf bonuses for bankers).

Something stinks very badly here. The media, on an industrial scale, have relentlessly covered up as much of the criminality as they possibly could, even after much of it was already public knowledge. They have weakly claimed in their defence that libel laws prevented them from publishing known facts about the affairs of Rangers and its various directors, even when these facts were already matters of public record.
To take but one example: it would clearly be in the public interest for journalists to regularly scrutinise the ongoing, chaotic tax affairs of Mr. Dave King, Rangers' second largest shareholder and until very recently a member of the board of directors. The South African Revenue Service is pursuing literally hundreds of charges of tax irregularities against Mr. King and yet I can think of no example of a single journalist asking the obvious question: why has such a man been a senior director of what we are often told is Scotland's second biggest institution?

This is not an unreasonable question for a decent investigative journalist to ask, nor would it require much research to pad out. Merely to copy half of what has already been published in South African newspapers would raise the question. What is it that prevents the editors of our national newspapers from pursuing this story? Could it be that their experience in their profession tells them that, no matter how grievous the fraud, the Law will usually find a way to give psychopathic predators a free pass so long as they wear suits and ties? And therefore, in their judgement, it is always safer to back rogues who have a place in the Establishment rather than trust in the Law's ability to ensure that justice is done in major scandals?