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Myler was offered a new deal that would have made him the highest paid player in the history of the club, but it was not enough to keep him out of Warrington's grasp.

Salford director of football Steve Simms said: "Warrington offered a significant amount of money for his services.

"We have always maintained that we wanted to keep Richie and build our future team around him and other home grown players. This was reflected in the substantial offer we made for Myler's future services.

"However Warrington were able to offer the player a startling contract and transfer fee for somebody who has only played a handful of games at this level.

"From the club's point of view, it made both good football and business sense to let Richie go as it is pointless to keep a player against his wishes.

Strengthen

"We can now invest the finance back into the squad to strengthen in all areas."

Underlined the bit Salford Director of Rugby Steve Simms is quoted as saying that makes interesting reading. If he stating this as a fact, and others suspect "fishy goings on" concerning players wages at Warrington, this does seriously make you wonder what the cap is in place for!

What is the point of a cap with one club apparently allowed to flout the rules, and bring the "cream" of playing talent to the club in order to gain success?

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528, ... 37,00.html

The combined outlay for the two England internationals is in excess of £300,000, with both players signing four-year deals until 2013.

Bradford's David Solomona will be the other fresh face with the Wolves, the experienced Samoan penning a one-year contract

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528, ... 06,00.html

Unless the two England Internationals are on a similar deal to the one with Gleeson, both receiving the majority of their wages once King etc leave in a year or two :doz:

The 300,000 is their transfer fees BM IIRC although it is a good figure in terms of what their salaries will cost minimum.

cpwigan wrote:The 300,000 is their transfer fees BM IIRC although it is a good figure in terms of what their salaries will cost minimum.

I understand it was probably most of what Wigan gave them for Gleeson CP, however the actual length of the contract was the interesting point. Especially knowing how clubs defer payments until later within the contract.

Very true BM and you could well be right.

DaveO wrote:

Shaun1967 wrote:The overseas loop tax loophole has not been closed, but is under scrutiny. The way this works is that players are payed part of their wage as "Image Rights" which is a tax free method of payment.

I don't think image rights are tax free. The tax free status of payments to players comes into play if they are paid into an offshore employee benefit trust. It could be anything paid to the player, not just image right.

Also a players salary cap value is calculated on the gross payments made to the player including image rights not payments net of tax.

The way I have understood it is that clubs are currently being investigated into the amount of money they are paying as image rights as these are tax free payments. It may well be that they are payed into benefit trusts, but are termed contractually as Image Rights payments.
Wigan's latest accounts show that they too are currently under investigation, but given the low percentage they pay in this way they should be cleared of any wrongdoing.

When paying a player in this way, the whole amount "the total sum of the Gross payments and other benefits" is declared on the cap despite it not all being taxable. This way the player pockets more money while the club is still paying out the same amount under the cap.

I still don't know how Warrington are making things add up though.

weststand-rich wrote: I doubt we're seeing subtle interpretations of the cap or tax law here. I'd guess the owner is paying players from his own company for 'consultation services' or some other puppet front. Totally separate from the RFL and nothing they can do about it>

Well they do say something about it. If any company or individual is associated to a club pays a player some money they have deemed to have been paid it because they are an RL player due to the association of the payee with the club.

If it was that easy to break the cap Mo and DW would have never been limited by it.

This is how Harris took the Bulls over the cap. I think it was a sponsor or firm who did some work for the Bulls paid him some cash and because they had some association with the Bulls then it counted on the cap and they went over.

Dave

Dave,

stating that as a policy and being able to enforce it are two separate things.

Perhap ML and DW didn't have enough creative nous to get away with it properly?

When Wigan got rumbled and the cap issues started mounting up from 2003/2004 onwards, it was doing stupid things like sending Shaun Briscoe to Hull with 2 P45s (one from Wigan and one from Orrell) that created so much bad feeling and antipathy towards us.

i have heard they take a large cash signing on fee (under the table) and then play on a small contract ,some 1 told me vinny andersonis on £30 grand a year how can he servive on that because of his large signing on fee(under the table)

Shaun1967 wrote:

DaveO wrote:

Shaun1967 wrote:The overseas loop tax loophole has not been closed, but is under scrutiny. The way this works is that players are payed part of their wage as "Image Rights" which is a tax free method of payment.

I don't think image rights are tax free. The tax free status of payments to players comes into play if they are paid into an offshore employee benefit trust. It could be anything paid to the player, not just image right.

Also a players salary cap value is calculated on the gross payments made to the player including image rights not payments net of tax.

The way I have understood it is that clubs are currently being investigated into the amount of money they are paying as image rights as these are tax free payments. It may well be that they are payed into benefit trusts, but are termed contractually as Image Rights payments.

My understanding is they are being investigated because image rights do not attract employer N.I.contributions.

Image rights for UK players are not tax free as that would just be a form of income but what sort of income is the important bit i.e. do they attract national insurance contributions. They are tax free to overseas players if they are paid into an EBT and they collect them when they return home but his is a different issue.

When the salary cap was £1.7m employer N.I. contributions were considered part of players salary. So the less N.I. you pay the more money you have to spend under the cap.

As image rights didn't attract N.I. then paying all your players a large chunk of their wages in image rights saved a lot of N.I. and made the cap go further be they UK or overseas players. Paying an overseas players image rights into an EBT avoided the NI but also resulted in a tax free payment.

What the RFL did was remove N.I. contributions from the cap and lower it to £1.6m to compensate.

There is now no point paying UK players image rights any more as a clubs paying less N.I. as a result does not make their cap go further.

The Inland Revenue reckon the clubs should have paid N.I. on the image rights and that is what they are after.

Wigan's latest accounts show that they too are currently under investigation, but given the low percentage they pay in this way they should be cleared of any wrongdoing.

When paying a player in this way, the whole amount "the total sum of the Gross payments and other benefits" is declared on the cap despite it not all being taxable. This way the player pockets more money while the club is still paying out the same amount under the cap.

There is definitely a tax break for overseas players if you put the money into an EBT but only for overseas players. For UK players they are just an N.I. avoidance scam is my understanding though of course the govt wants to tax offshore earnings as well now.

Dave

I wonder if Nick Fozzard gets 'Images Rights', or whether he has to pay a refund??