Hearts pay dispute: SPL under fire for taking action over brief wages delay at Hearts

THE Scottish Premier League’s decision to charge Hearts over its alleged late payment of players’ salaries has left former Hearts chairman Leslie Deans “flabbergasted”.

Last night Deans received the backing of Hearts striker Kevin Kyle, who said the players had been paid and could not see why the SPL wanted to press ahead with action.

The Tynecastle club has been charged with “failing to behave with the utmost good faith to the SPL” over the payment of players’ salaries for January. Hearts insist they processed payments on the afternoon of Monday 16, the due date, but the SPL say that the terms of their ruling on 4 January were not met, as not all the players got money into their bank accounts on time. Deans said that, when Hearts were clearly doing their best to pay their staff, he could not understand why the SPL should take issue over a matter of a few hours. “I am flabbergasted by that,” he said. “Are they seriously suggesting they would take action against a member club because some payments were a few hours late? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

“If players were being evicted from their homes or their families were starving because they had no money you could see the point. But taking action at this time beggars belief.

“Are the SPL not aware there is an economic crisis? There is a battle going on at Tynecastle to stabilise the finances, and this threatened action is not going to help at all.”

Kyle was one of 14 players who complained to their union, PFA Scotland, after their salaries were late for the third month running. It was that complaint which led to the SPL’s 4 January ruling, but the forward said the issue has been settled as far as the players were concerned.

“Us as the players are happy with the situation,” he told the BBC. “We’ve got our wages and that’s all we were asking for.

“It has been a difficult period, there’s no denying that – 14 of us made a complaint to the PFA to try to find out what was happening because we weren’t getting any answers. Nobody was telling us exactly what was happening. It was all a guessing game.

“I think we got a group call on Friday to say the funds had been secured and we would be paid. The club said what they were going to do and we’ve been paid, so I don’t see any problems with it. As a group, we decided we’ll make this complaint and try to get somebody to find out what is happening. That got processed, the SPL made a statement, the wages arrived and, for me personally and the rest of the lads at the club, that’s the end of the matter. That’s the club assured us that we’ll get our wages on time and they will continue.”

But the governing body remains convinced that it has evidence from Hearts themselves of the club’s failure to comply with the league’s instructions. “The SPL has received confirmation from Heart of Midlothian that the club has failed to comply with this order,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The SPL yesterday refused to say what kind of confirmation it had received. Hearts insist they have said nothing in their dealings with the league which would amount to an admission of guilt.

The SPL’s charge will now be ruled upon, at least in the first instance, by a sub-committee of its board. The membership of that sub-committee has yet to be appointed, and while any or all members of the SPL board could sit on it, others who hold no official posts with any member club could also be invited.

The SPL has also yet to decide whether the sub-committee will have the power to rule on the charge, or will only be allowed to advise the board on the course of action it thinks appropriate.

Whether it is the sub-committee or the board which makes the ruling, a wide range of sanctions is available, including fines, transfer bans and points deductions. A senior SPL source insisted yesterday that, despite one report claiming that a points deduction was the most likely outcome, there was no way anyone could know what would be decided by a sub-committee which had not even been appointed, far less heard any evidence.

Even so, staff at Hearts remain perplexed about the apparent hardline stance being taken against them over an alleged few hours’ delay in paying salaries by an organisation which took no action in October and November when payments were weeks late.