Parramatta Eels officials fighting NRL's proposed salary-cap sanctions in Supreme Court
Updated 18 minutes ago
Tue 3 May 2016, 6:18pm
The five Parramatta officials in danger of being deregistered by the NRL are in the Supreme Court in Sydney this evening fighting
the league's proposed sanctions for salary cap breaches.
Chairman Steve Sharp, deputy chairman Tom Issa, director Peter Serrao, chief executive John Boulos and football manager Daniel Anderson have been asked to show cause why their registrations should not be cancelled.
Lawyers acting for the group say they have been denied "procedural fairness", a claim denied by lawyers for the NRL.
A judge has made an interim order, preventing the NRL from imposing limitations on the officials' duties. The league had wanted to restrict their duties to preparing responses to the allegations. The case will return to court on Friday.
The club will not be able to accrue any competition points until the 2016 team is back under the cap, and it remains to be seen what effect, if any, the officials' legal action will have on the speed of this process.
It comes after
coach Brad Arthur said the playing unit was focused on winning 12 of its final 15 games in order to make the finals after being stripped of the 12 competition points it had gained through nine rounds.
While Tuesday's announcements pertained to the club and officials, players and their agents may still have questions to answer after the next phase of the NRL integrity unit's investigation is complete.
"There's a phase of this investigation to come. I'm looking at some of the material we have and the conduct of player agents," integrity unit boss Nick Weeks said.
"Ultimately that's going to be passed across to the agent's accreditation committee if in fact we identify material we think they ought to have a look at."
"There's a piece of work that we still need to do with respect to agents and we will look at the conduct of some players in that as well," he added.
Weeks said part of the evidence surrounding the club's cap rorting involved paying players cash under the table but added he could not make a blanket statement about any possible punishments or any one player's culpability in cheating the cap.
"In some cases it would be perfectly reasonable for a player to be under the impression that he has a legitimate third-party arrangement with a company," he said.
"We might look at that from a different perspective from the salary cap rules."
Despite this, Weeks said players, not just clubs, were beholden to cap regulations and "like most things in life, there has to be accountability".
Punishments cannot be meted out to the club without impacting the playing group, despite the protestations of a number of former players, including former Brisbane Bronco Denan Kemp.
Kemp hosts a web series called The Locker Room and wrote on its Facebook page about how unfair it was that players would be punished for the club's mistakes.
"To punish an entire group of players that most likely had absolutely no knowledge of their club officials' actions is an outrage. Why should the group of players suffer the brunt of the punishment when they had absolutely nothing to do with the management of the salary cap?" the post read.
"It wasn't the players' responsibility to keep tabs on their salary cap nor should it be. It's the NRL and the Eels board responsibility.
"First the board failed the players and then the NRL failed the players by not staying on top of each club's salary cap and how it was spent. And yet as usual the players and the fans will suffer the blow of the NRL's mismanagement."
