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Force admits Sharpe top-up
Wayne Smith, August 18, 2007
WESTERN FORCE chief Peter O'Meara admitted last night he had directly paid Nathan Sharpe from team funds to make up a shortfall in what the former Wallabies captain had been promised from corporate sources.
But in an exclusive interview with The Weekend Australian, O'Meara denied he had ever made any similar payments to three other senior players named in media reports, Brendan Cannon, Scott Staniforth and Chris O'Young. However, the Force boss did concede he had made a $300,000 allowance in his budget to cover that contingency if the players' corporate benefactors reneged on deals.
The startling revelations come in the wake of yesterday's decision by the Australian Rugby Union to have chairman Peter McGrath and chief executive John O'Neill meet their WA Rugby counterparts Geoff Stooke and O'Meara to discuss the Force's controversial contractual arrangements.
"Subject to the outcome of that meeting, the ARU will consider referring the matter to an independent judicial committee," O'Neill said last night.
O'Meara's admissions to The Weekend Australian, following on an investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald, are certain to rock Australia's newest Super 14 club to its foundations. But the Force boss defiantly insisted that in the absence of any leadership or assistance from the ARU at the time the fledgling club was attempting to establish itself, his organisation had no alternative but to sidestep standard contracting conventions.
"When you don't get the leadership that you need from an organisation, then you're forced into a situation where you have to be innovative and creative about how you actually differentiate a proposition to attract footballers."
The Force has always maintained, in the face of ferocious attacks from the other Super 14 teams, the Queensland Reds in particular, that if the players' managers independently obtained third-party agreements for their clients in addition to the standard contracts all clubs were allowed to offer, then it was doing nothing wrong.
Whether Sharpe's corporate deal was legitimately organised will be for McGrath and O'Neill to establish, but clearly when the promised money was not forthcoming, the Force stepped in and paid the shortfall.
"The (corporate) relationship with Sharpie took more than the first year to embed," O'Meara explained. "There is no need for any provision in our accounts in 2007 but in the first year we took a provision and in year one Nathan was paid by Rugby WA until the corporate relationship was embedded.
"That's why the provision was made, but that is no longer the case.
"All I did was ... we made some commitments and being a good accountant, I made appropriate provision in our accounts to make sure that those undertakings that we made - and they weren't contractual undertakings but we had a moral obligation to make sure that what we said we'd do for those players we did."
O'Meara denied suggestions that the $300,000 provision was deliberately buried in the Force's financial report. "No, it was in our accounts, transparent to anyone who wanted to look at them," he said. "It was not buried but in the player development area of our budget.
"The $300,000 was a provision that we took that basically covered four or five players. It was a provision that we said we better put in place in case they do (need to be paid in the event of their corporate sponsors not meeting their obligations). It was there but we didn't need to call on that."
The Force boss claimed that the ARU gave the new franchise no concessions or special funding assistance to establish itself, despite the fact that it faced massive additional costs that the three established clubs, the Reds, NSW Waratahs and ACT Brumbies, did not have to meet - namely relocating about 40 players and staff to Perth.
"Before any protocols were actually documented in 2006, there were players in Australia receiving commercial payments benefits that were underwritten by clubs and some clubs, in the case of Queensland, were paying players directly out of the operating costs of their business," O'Meara claimed.
"So there were no rules, just these conventions. It (the Force's contractual approach) might have got up people's noses but what was illegal about it?
"If we're going to talk about what transpired pre-contractual regulations, are we happy to accept that Queensland can do it with Wallaby-standard players but the Western Force can't?
"Is it one approach for us and another approach for other teams?"
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