YOU know you are in trouble when Private Eye magazine features you in their back pages.

Over the years the satirical mag has been responsible for outing tax evasion schemes and the authorities who permitted them which is why they have turned their attention to the Scottish FA.

In the latest edition, Private Eye’s Planet Football section mentions the curious silence of the Scottish media over the recent offshoregame.net internet report which makes all sorts of allegations about the SFA and Rangers at the time of the Green and Whyte debacle – please note, the current Rangers board are in no way involved in any of those goings on, though the Kicker can reveal that the club is still considering going to the Court for Arbitration in Sport over the £250,000 fine levied on them by Lord Nimmo Smith’s commission, and as such the SPFL hasn’t yet collected the fine.

However, it is the role of the SFA that Private Eye is worried about. The Kicker wondered how they alighted on this story, after all its editor Ian Hislop, as he often says on Have I Got New For You, knows more about cricket than fitba’. The answer to that mystery seems to be through the Celtic Quick News website, which stated that they “asked if Private Eye would be brave enough to feature Resolution 12 in their 22nd June edition”.

For the uninitiated, resolution 12 was raised by Celtic shareholders asking Uefa to “review and investigate the SFA’s implementation of UEFA & SFA license compliance requirements”, as they felt that Rangers’ tax problems should have disqualified them from European competition in 2011-12, with Celtic taking their place.

Uefa have said they won’t be investigating but Private Eye has now seized on this whole SFA issue and any journalist worth his salt will tell you that the Eye doesn’t let go of a subject until it gets answers.

The Eye on page 94 cites the offshoregame.net report alleging that “the Scottish Premier League inquiry into Rangers’ use of undisclosed employment benefit trusts (EBTs) to pay players had either been misled or misled itself, and how subsequently the Scottish Football Association had ignored Rangers’ related EBT problems with the taxman to allow the financially struggling club to compete in the 2011-12 Champions League, contrary to UEFA rules.”

Effectively the Eye follows up the offshoregame.net’s views, which should be deeply worrying for the SFA.

The magazine also quotes the supposed advice of former Rangers legal adviser Andrew Thornhill QC that oldco Rangers should have settled with the Revenue for £2.8m. Did the SFA and Lord Nimmo Smith know that?

It is the SFA’s involvement in all of this which should concern Scottish football as a whole. The Eye will return to this subject, as will we in due course.